A fast-moving cholera outbreak in Sudan has killed at least 172 people and sickened more than 2,500 others in just the past week, health officials said Wednesday, as returning residents to the war-ravaged capital face collapsed sanitation systems and contaminated water.
The outbreak, centered in Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman, has been fueled by the mass return of displaced Sudanese who fled the country’s two-year-old civil war. Many have come back to find only unsafe water and destroyed infrastructure.
UNICEF warned that reported daily cholera cases jumped ninefold from May 15 to 25, reaching 815 a day, and that more than 7,700 cases, including over 1,000 in children under five, have been diagnosed since January.
Most of the cases are in Khartoum and Omdurman, but the disease has also spread to five surrounding provinces, according to the Health Ministry.
In Omdurman, treatment centers run by Doctors Without Borders are overwhelmed, said Sudan coordinator Joyce Bakker. “The scenes are disturbing,” she said. “Many patients are arriving too late to be saved … Our teams can only see a fraction of the full picture.”
The crisis comes as returning families find their homes and neighborhoods devastated by the conflict between General al-Burhan’s army (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Since the military recaptured parts of Khartoum in March, about 34,000 people have returned to a city with no reliable clean water. Attacks on power plants have worsened the shortages.
“People have been drinking polluted water and transferring it into unhygienic containers,” said Dr. Rania Elsayegh of Sudan’s Doctors for Human Rights.
With 80% of hospitals out of service and remaining facilities lacking water, electricity and medicines, health workers fear the outbreak will spread rapidly in packed displacement centers.
Cholera, a diarrheal disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, is treatable but can kill within hours if left untreated. The World Health Organization has described it as a “disease of poverty” linked to poor sanitation and dirty water. Global cholera vaccine stockpiles are now below minimum thresholds, complicating efforts to contain outbreaks that have been rising since 2021.
The civil war, which began in April 2023, has killed at least 24,000 people, displaced 14 million, and pushed parts of Sudan to famine. Mass killings and rapes have been documented by international groups, which say they amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Sudan has faced repeated cholera outbreaks in recent years, with one in late 2023 killing more than 600 people in just two months. Other diseases are also spreading; health officials said Tuesday that an outbreak of dengue fever has infected nearly 13,000 people and killed 20 in the past week. At least 12 people have also died of meningitis, officials said.