UN Migration: ‘81% of rural Sudan does not have access to health services’

According to the United Nation’s affiliate agency, International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Sudan, approximately 81 per cent of the population does not have access to a functional health centre within a two-hour walk from their home.

They also reported the lack of ambulances and primary health care services in remote areas of Darfur, noting that communities experience life-threatening delays in receiving appropriate urgent health responses. Communicable diseases like cholera, malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and diarrhoea leading to malnutrition among children and pregnant and lactating mothers are common in the area.

In an official handover ceremony to the State Ministry of Health in the North Darfur capital of El Fasher, the IOM donated a new ambulance to El Sareif village. IOM’s Regional Coordinator in Darfur, Dario Festa, said that he hoped the ambulance would “significantly reduce delays in emergency response and ensure community members have access to immediate care”.

Sudan’s mortuaries

Mortuaries in Khartoum are reportedly in a tragic state, according to the Director of the Forensic Medicine Authority at the Ministry of Health of Khartoum, Hisham Zein El Abidine. In an interview with Sudan Lite, the director stated that rats were “eating the corpses” in the Bashayer Mortuary. Abidine warned that the capital could face an environmental catastrophe due to the “accumulation of corpses and the emission of odour”.