Orbits: Alarming Statistics

By: Muawad Rashid

In the news, the Federal Ministry of Health described the cases of tuberculosis as epidemic and severe, where the state of Khartoum recorded the highest rate of infection with the disease, followed by the states of Gezira, Gedaref and Kassala,

The Ministry noted that the National Tuberculosis Control Program recorded last year 18,775 cases of tuberculosis, of which 72% were pulmonary tuberculosis, while the percentage of infected women reached 31%, men 60% and children 9%.

The number of cases of tuberculosis, which was resistant to medicines, reached 150, and the epidemic rates reached 100,000 of the population, while the death rate reached 8.7 per 100,000 populations, and the incidence of resistant tuberculosis was 2.1 per 100,000 population.

The ministry described the health situation in the country as catastrophic due to political and economic instability.

The Sudan office of the United Nations International Children’s Fund (Unicef), launched recently an appeal to raise $110 million to meet humanitarian needs for children in Sudan.

The appeal is part of a Unicef annual global Humanitarian Action for Children, which aims at mobilizing resources and drawing attention to the plight of children worldwide.

Unicef in Sudan is planning to reach over two million children this year across the country.

About 13% of African children who suffer from severe acute malnutrition are in Sudan, the statement said.

Unicef figures show that two million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, 550,000 of them severely malnourished.

The paradox in Sudan which is labeled as “the world’s breadbasket”, due to its vast natural resources, is the outbreak of tuberculosis, which is mainly caused by malnutrition.

To understand how such a disease is spreading in a country with 200 million arable acres and more than 100 million head of livestock, all you need to do is trace the history of its civil wars.

These bloody conflicts, moving from region to region and from decade to decade, over the course of the country’s more than six decades since independence, had its impact on the governments’ expenditure as the budgets are always “war budget” rather than development.

Today, while the government does not disclose its military and security spending, which experts estimate at more than half of the budget, according to official figures, the health budget, according to official figures, did not exceeded the 2% in the recent years.

Conflict-related displacements, El Nino, epidemics, floods and droughts exacerbated the nutrition and food security situation of Sudanese children.

The ongoing violence in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Abyei has forced more than 3.2 million people to flee their homes. Among these are 1.9 million children, many of whom have been separated from their families and affected by grave violations

Sudan’s government is working with its partners to implement national priority programs addressing malnutrition and reducing children’s mortality rates.

Our message to our country’s leaders that the health situation is in crisis as a result of the political and economic situation, so it is high time to disregard the political disputes and internalize their agonies to come up with a compromise