Hospitals across Sudan are running critically short of medical oxygen, forcing doctors to watch patients suffocate as war, looting and power cuts cripple supply lines, health workers and officials say.
At Omdurman Teaching Hospital, one of the country’s oldest facilities, more than 10 patients died in December when tanks ran dry during surgery or post-operative care, a doctor told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Prices for a single black-market cylinder in nearby Al Obeid have climbed to 340,000 Sudanese pounds (about US$150) — far beyond what cash-strapped hospitals treating mostly displaced people can pay.
North Darfur’s Health Ministry said it has resorted to buying half-filled cylinders from a local trader after regime oxygen plants were bombed or stripped bare. “The terms are unfair, but without them hospitals would shut,” state health minister Ibrahim Khater said.
Production has also collapsed in River Nile state, where drone strikes on power stations on April 25 and the shutdown of Merowe Dam generators on May 17 cut output at the Atbara oxygen plant from 170 cylinders a day to just 13, officials said.
Doctors in besieged El Fasher and other front-line cities say the shortages are killing premature babies, trauma patients and pregnant women who suffer complications during delivery. “When oxygen is absent, many patients are doomed to die,” a surgeon at El Obeid Hospital said.
Fuel shortages, rolling blackouts and widespread looting have battered Sudan’s health sector since fighting erupted in April 2023 between General al-Burhan’s army (SAF) and the RSF.
More than 80 percent of hospitals in combat zones are shut, according to the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate.
An overlapping cholera outbreak — Sudan’s third since the war began — is straining the few facilities still open. Staff at Al-No Hospital in Omdurman say they now treat more than 200 cholera patients a day and have been barred from using mobile phones to keep the scale of the epidemic from leaking.
Aid agencies warn that without urgent fuel deliveries and new oxygen plants, thousands more could die in the coming weeks.