Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim, Sudan’s health minister, said in a Sunday statement that a cholera outbreak in his country has killed around two dozen people and sickened hundreds more in recent weeks.
Ibrahim’s statement said that at least 354 confirmed cases of cholera have recently been detected across Sudan. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) said that 78 deaths were recorded this year in Sudan due to cholera as of July 28, while 2,400 other people were sickened by the disease in the same time span.
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Ibrahim declared cholera an epidemic in Sudan in a video released on Saturday.
“We are declaring a cholera epidemic because of the weather conditions and because drinking water has been contaminated,” Ibrahim said in the video, per AFP.
Photo by AFP via Getty Images
According to WHO, “cholera is an extremely virulent disease transmitted through the ingestion of contaminated food or water.” The disease “can cause severe acute watery diarrhea and the severe forms of the disease can kill within hours if left untreated.”
Sudan is already reeling from heavy flooding that the U.N. migration agency said has resulted in about 118,000 people being displaced. Ibrahim’s announcement also follows a warning earlier this month from U.S. officials that mass famine in Sudan, driven by the ongoing war and blocked aid, is expected to worsen and could be on track to become the deadliest famine in over a decade.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee (FRC), the main global body analyzing food crises, concluded that there is famine in Zamzam camp in the North Darfur, Sudan. This is the third time the committee has ever used the categorization.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been raging on for 16 months with devastating humanitarian impacts. According to the United Nations, nearly 10.7 million people have been internally displaced and upwards of 14,000 people have been killed.
According to the AP, international rights groups have also said mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that could be classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity have occurred during the conflict.
The FRC wrote in its report that “the main drivers of famine in Zamzam camp are conflict and lack of humanitarian access,” as food and other humanitarian aid has been blocked by the fighting factions from entering the camp.
“This is entirely a man-made famine,” U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power said in a statement released on August 1.
Power added, “Both the SAF and RSF—enabled by external patrons—are using starvation as a weapon of war, actively preventing food, including life-saving emergency nutritional supplements, from reaching people in need.”