The cholera ward in Tawila, Sudan, was overflowing the first week of August, a grim sign of what the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said in a release on Thursday was “the worst cholera outbreak the country has seen in years.”
International charities have warned that the spread of the disease, no longer contained within Sudan’s borders, might exacerbate similar outbreaks across the region.
“People cross borders,” Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s representative to Sudan, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “This epidemic has already crossed into South Sudan, and it’s crossing into Chad. Unless we’re able to address this crisis, we risk it rippling across borders for weeks and months to come.”
Sudan has had nearly 100,000 suspected cases of cholera and has reported more than 2,400 cholera-related deaths since the country’s Health Ministry declared an outbreak a year ago, Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said in its statement. The group said it had documented 40 deaths over the span of one week in the western Darfur region of Sudan alone.
The town of Tawila, in the state of North Darfur, has become a hotbed for disease. The town is about 44 miles from the city of El Fasher, the Sudanese Army’s last holdout in the Darfur region that has been under siege for over a year. The local population has ballooned to include hundreds of thousands of people fleeing nearby violence.
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