28-04-2025
World's only research centre for flesh-eating infection ransacked in Sudan
The footage sent Dr Ahmed Fahal into shock. On the outskirts of Khartoum, his research centre had been completely ransacked – the reception burned, the laboratory stripped, and four decades of biobank samples destroyed.
'I'm not sure when it took place… but we discovered the damage two weeks ago,' he told the Telegraph from Cairo, where he fled when a brutal civil war broke out in Sudan in April 2023.
'[When I saw the video], I was not able to start or to talk or to communicate with anybody. All this time I had believed the centre was safe – but now we found this. It's a really sad, sad story,' he said.
Dr Fahal heads the Mycetoma Research Centre in Sudan, the world's only specialist facility treating and researching the flesh-eating infection.
But it's become yet another victim of the country's conflict, in a 'major blow' for efforts to tackle the disease.
'I don't know how to describe the kind of set back it has provided,' said Dr Borna Nyaoke-Anoke, head of mycetoma at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi). 'It's devastating.'
