New cholera outbreak in Sudan kills more than 170 people in a week
Leading medical group Doctors Without Borders — also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres or MSF — warned that the country's existing health facilities were unable to cope with the surge of patients.
According to Joyce Bakker, Sudan co-ordinator for MSF, the alarming spike began in mid-May, with the organisation's teams treating almost 2,000 suspected cholera cases in the past week alone.
On Saturday, Sudan's health minister Haitham Ibrahim said the increase in cholera cases just in the Khartoum region had been estimated to average 600 to 700 per week over the past four weeks.
Ms Bakker said MSF's treatment centres in Omdurman were overwhelmed and that the 'scenes are disturbing'.
'Many patients are arriving too late to be saved,' she said.
'We don't know the true scale of the outbreak, and our teams can only see a fraction of the full picture.'
She called for a united response, including water, sanitation and hygiene programmes and more treatment facilities.
In March, MSF said that 92 people had died of cholera in Sudan's White Nile State, where 2,700 people had contracted the disease since late February.
The World Health Organisation said that the water-borne disease was a fast-developing and highly contagious infection that caused diarrhoea and led to severe dehydration and possible death within hours when not treated. The disease was transmitted through the ingestion of contaminated food or water.
The outbreak is the latest crisis for Sudan, which was plunged into a war more than two years ago, when tensions between the Sudanese army and its rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces group, or RSF, exploded with street battles in Khartoum that quickly spread across the country.
Since then, at least 20,000 people have been reported to have been killed, although the number is likely to be far higher, and more than 14 million have been displaced and forced from their homes.
Sudan has also been engulfed by what the United Nations says is the world's largest humanitarian crisis, and disease outbreaks, famine and atrocities have mounted as the African country entered its third year of war.
Last week, the Sudanese military said it had regained control of the Greater Khartoum area from the paramilitary forces.
Mr Ibrahim, the health minister, attributed the cholera surge to the return of many Sudanese to the Khartoum region — people who had fled their homes to escape the fighting and were now coming back. Their returns had strained the city's dwindling water resources, he said.
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