Leading medical group warns of rise in cholera cases and new outbreak in Sudan
A leading medical group has warned of a rising number of cholera cases in war-torn Sudan as a new outbreak of the waterborne disease grips the country.
Joyce Bakker, the Sudan co-ordinator for Doctors Without Borders — also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) — said its teams had treated hundreds of patients in the region of the capital, Khartoum.
Advertisement
She said the alarming spike began in mid-May, with Khartoum's twin city, Omdurman, as the epicentre, and that MSF had treated almost 2,000 suspected cholera cases in the past week alone.
There were no immediate official figures of fatalities from cholera in this latest outbreak, although an aid worker said he was told on Monday of 12 people dying of cholera.
Sudan's health minister said the recent increase in cholera cases was estimated to average 600 to 700 per week, over the past four weeks (AP)
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.
Sudan was plunged into war more than two years ago, when tensions between the Sudanese army and its rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces group, or RSF, exploded with battles in Khartoum and across the country.
Advertisement
Since then, at least 20,000 people have been tallied as being killed, although the number is likely to be far higher, and the African nation has been engulfed by what the United Nations says is the world's largest humanitarian crisis.
More than 14 million people have been displaced and forced from their homes and disease outbreaks, famine and atrocities have mounted as the country entered its third year of war.
Sudan's health minister Haitham Ibrahim said on Saturday that the recent increase in cholera cases was estimated to average 600 to 700 per week, over the past four weeks.
He attributed the surge to the return of many Sudanese to the Khartoum region — people who had fled their homes to escape the fighting and who were now coming back. Their returns had strained the city's dwindling water resources, he said.
Advertisement
Last week, the Sudanese military said it had regained control of the Greater Khartoum area from the paramilitary forces.
On Monday, Mohanad Elbalal, co-founder of the Khartoum Aid Kitchen, said he was told that 12 people had died of cholera in Omdurman, including a relative of one of his kitchen staff.
MSF called for a united response, including water, sanitation and hygiene programmes and more treatment facilities (AP)
Ms Bakker, the MSF co-ordinator, said on Tuesday that the group's treatment centres in Omdurman were overwhelmed and that the 'scenes are disturbing'.
'Many patients are arriving too late to be saved,' she said.
Advertisement
'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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
It's my goal to live to 100 – and it's not just diet and exercise that will help me achieve it
For much of the past century, life expectancy continually increased. In most countries in the world, children could hope to live, on average, longer, healthier lives than their parents. This expectation is still true of the mega-wealthy. In fact, tech billionaires and multimillionaires have recently been fixated on finding the secret to longer life, convinced that with enough money, technology and cutting-edge science, they can stave off the inevitable for a few more decades to reach 120 or even 150 years old. But their efforts aren't trickling down to the rest of us. The world's health crises are getting worse, with life expectancy going backwards in several high-income countries, such as the UK and US. In Britain, stagnation started before the Covid pandemic and has decreased by six months, and in the US by 2.33 years. Obesity rates are rising – not just in wealthy countries, but also in places like Ghana, which has experienced a 650% increase in obesity since 1980. Not 65%; 650%. Clean air is a rarity in most places in the world. Mental health conditions like depression are on the rise, worsened by financial precarity and stress. We've been told for decades that if we just optimise ourselves, we can live longer, healthier lives. So how can we explain the gap between our growing knowledge about living longer and our collective health going backwards? Personally, I've set myself a suitably ambitious goal: to live to 100 with good health and to help others to do the same. According to the ONS life expectancy calculator, I have a 9.3% chance of making it that long (although even more challenging is to have a quality life during this time). As someone who has a strong interest in and passion for health, I follow the latest research on superfoods and what to eat. I've tried sugar-free diets; I went vegan for a period. I've tried all kinds of different exercise regimes from running long distances to intervals to HIIT (high intensity interval training) to Hyrox, outdoor bootcamps, spin, hot pilates, barre and paddleboard yoga. In my mid-30s, I decided to become a personal trainer to combine my interest in fitness, nutrition and wellbeing. However, every time my mind goes down the 'optimisation' route, I'm reminded of my main job and lifelong career as a public health scientist, looking into the factors that affect how long we will live. Most of these are out of individual control and have to do with the country and community we live in. The truth is, this 'self-help' narrative doesn't reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue –the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity. In public health, research projects have studied places where people live significantly longer, healthier lives – think of Japan or South Korea, or within Europe, Zurich, Madrid or Sardinia. In these places, chronic diseases like heart disease and obesity are far less common. Take Japan, which has 80% less breast and prostate cancer than North Americans and half the risk of hip fractures. Much work has gone into analysing the behaviours of people living within these cities and regions. Based on this, we get lists of changes we could be making at an individual level to live longer, such as moving to a largely plant-based diet, sleeping seven to nine hours a night and exposing yourself to a certain amount of sunlight each day. These are of course helpful, but I suspect that hardly anyone in the areas above has read a self-help book or has a daily health 'to do' list. What stands out about these places is that the people living there don't just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture. Take the issue of obesity: the UK isn't fatter than Japan because it is a country filled with fundamentally different people who choose to be overweight or are lazy or stupid – that kind of logic is not only naive, but it stigmatises overweight people. In fact it seems like at the level of choice, the UK is more interested in dieting, with a diet industry estimated to be worth £2bn annually and diet books selling millions of copies each year. In contrast, Japan's diet industry is tiny, worth only $42.8m. The main difference is actually in the food environment – including affordable fruit and vegetables, nutritious school meals and support from the government – meaning that it's far easier for an individual to stay within a healthy weight living in Japan. The odds are stacked against you in Britain. You can become the healthy 'outlier' or bubble yourself off from larger societal challenges if you have wealth, time and resources. You can carry an air purifier, drink a matcha latte, swim in expensive leisure centres, even hire a chef to bake you fresh bread and prepare nutritious meals. There's a reason that being a royal or marrying into royalty is one of the surest ways to live a long and healthy life. But for those of us who are commoners, there's no fully opting out of the societal factors completely: we have to go outside to breathe air, walk and cycle the streets, drink tapwater and eat the foods available near where we live or at school. As I talk about in my new book, if I'm going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life. If we think of Ponce de León's quest for immortality in the 16th century – at a time when life expectancy in his native Spain was just 25 to 30 years, perhaps the lesson is that the answer for longer, healthier lives wasn't in a fountain of youth but in the rise of stable government, public services, science and community. Tech billionaires could take note. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
The Guardian
18 hours ago
- The Guardian
Countries under Trump's travel ban are unique subjects of American imperialism
The list of countries banned by the Trump administration's newest order seems to have no rhyme or reason. Little connects Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, all targeted for a total ban, or Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela, all targeted for restrictions. The reasoning stated in the order is that they all pose security threats measured by 'whether each country has a significant terrorist presence within its territory, its visa-overstay rate, and its cooperation with accepting back its removable nationals'. Visa overstays, the order elaborates, 'indicates a blatant disregard for United States immigration laws'. Yet the latest data on overstays from Customs and Border Protection does show these countries high on the list, along with others not included. If we sit with this list a little longer, though, with attention to the history of the world we share, we can see a different unifying logic. All of these countries are in the global south, their citizens are racialized as Black or brown and Muslim. Most have high poverty rates that hover at or above half their population. Several have recently been sites of social upheaval or horrific wars. Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan, for example, all appear on the World Food Program's list of the world's most dire food crises. These facts do not, as the travel ban assumes, tell of the inherent violence of people from these nations, nor of a penchant to 'disregard' law. In fact, even the data on overstays says nothing of people's legal status. Nationals of Afghanistan, Burma, El Salvador, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela have long had a right to apply for temporary protective status due to the insecurity of their countries. We do not know how many of the so-called 'overstayers' applied for other protections like asylum. The poverty and insecurity of these nations are mainly an indication that they have been subject to imperialism, including US military and economic intervention and coercion. You cannot understand the endemic violence or economic destitution that forces people to leave Haiti without attending to both the French extortion of the island nation in exchange for their freedom from enslavement, and the United States' occupation of it. You cannot understand the mass exodus of people from Afghanistan, one of the world's largest refugee populations, without understanding the United States' funding of the Mujahideen, or the so-called 'war on terror', that did little more than further destabilize the nation. Iran's current regime is only possible because the US supported British efforts in destroying Iranian democracy to save British Petroleum. US sanctions, whether in Iran or Venezuela or in Cuba, have not contributed to pressuring regime change, but rather to economic devastation and mass displacement. American shrapnel has been pulled from the bodies of Yemeni children. Since March, 250 people have been killed in US strikes on Saada and Sanaa, at least 68 of whom were detained African migrants. Time and time again data shows that African countries such as oil-rich Equatorial Guinea and Chad, ravaged by companies such as Exxon Mobile, and gold-rich Sudan, are not victims of poverty, but victims of theft. The United Nations estimates that $86bn leaves the continent each year in 'illicit financial flows', or theft through criminal activities and tax evasion. What's more, between 1970 and 2022, countries in the global south, including those on this list, are estimated to have paid more than $2.5tn in interest alone to the benefit of the global north. Thomas Sankara, a former president of Burkina Faso, once called debt a 'skillfully managed reconquest of Africa'. The wealthiest nations in the world are causing the climate crisis that the poorest nations pay for. Climate activists estimate that governments in the global north owe $5tn each year to countries in the global south for the devastation they are causing them. Seen from this vantage, Trump's travel ban, which proudly cites what came to be known as the 'Muslim ban' of his first administration in its opening paragraphs, is a cruel escalation of a longstanding policy of profiting off Black and brown lives and disposing of the most vulnerable among them. In displacement camps in New York and Tijuana and the Aegean islands of Greece, I have met pharmacists, artists, DJs and journalists from many of the targeted countries. Just this week I spoke to a political activist who, forced to flee a massacre in one of the targeted countries, left her three young children behind. Speaking to me after the issuance of this ban, she worried whether she would be able to secure her asylum, which is currently being adjudicated, and whether she could ever reunify her family. Her voice broke as she said: 'I wish they could understand that I never wanted to come here.' Trump justified the ban by referencing a recent incident in which an Egyptian man in Boulder, Colorado, injured 12 people calling for the release of Israeli hostages (though notably Egypt is not on the list). That this one act justifies the banning of millions of people is absurd. This latest ban is simply another installation in a series of policies meant to 'Make America white again', following a ban on asylum and a cancellation of humanitarian parole. It comes as attacks on our immigrant students continue, particularly those who dare speak out against the US funding of Gaza's decimation. It is not the people of these nations that are a threat to the security of the United States. It is the United States that has long been a threat to them, robbing them of their wealth, destroying their institutions and environments, and then denying them participation in the safety built at their expense. We should be atoning for our sins, not exacerbating them.
BBC News
18 hours ago
- BBC News
Outdoor Eid prayers in Ipswich 'bring the community together'
Prayers marking the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha have been held in front of a historical Tudor event was organised by volunteers from the four mosques and prayer rooms in Ipswich, with more than 200 people gathering in Christchurch Park despite rain Ali, one of the volunteers, said: "It's about bringing the community together, all our brothers and sisters, even though it's raining!" The festival remembers the prophet Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son when God ordered him to, a story also recounted in the Bible's Old Testament. Abdulkadir Osman is originally from Sudan and has been in Ipswich for about five said: "I'm here with everyone, different backgrounds, different cultures."It's not like the big cities like London or Birmingham, but there is a good community here."Adam Omer, also from Sudan, said: "We are joined with our Muslim ummah around the world, and I want to say Eid Mubarak to those in Sudan, you know the situation there, and also in Gaza." The prayers and a short address started at 10:00 BST and lasted about 30 ceremony was led by Shaykh Masum Shaheed, who spoke about the meaning of the said: "I ask you to pause and ask, 'What does love really mean to you? What does it mean in the eyes of our faith?'"Tanisha, 14, said: "I love that it is outdoors. Other people walking by can see us, because I know some people are confused about what Eid is and why we celebrate it."I love telling people [about my faith] as it is something I'm really proud of." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
