Sudanese Cholera Outbreak Overwhelms Capital

CAIRO (AP) — A new cholera outbreak in Sudan has killed 172 people and sickened more than 2,500 over the past week, authorities said Tuesday as a leading medical group warned that the country’s existing health facilities were unable to cope with the surge of patients. The bulk of the cases were reported in the capital, Khartoum, and its twin city of Omdurman, but cholera was also detected in multiple other provinces. According to Joyce Bakker, the Sudan coordinator for Doctors Without Borders – the alarming spike began in mid-May, with MSF 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 has been estimated to average 600 to 700 per week over the past four weeks. Bekker said MSF’s treatment centers in Omdurman are 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.” 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.