Doctors Without Borders launches emergency appeal for Sudan

Geneva-based Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has launched an emergency appeal to help people affected by the floods in Sudan, Sudan News Agency (SUNA) reported yesterday.

“MSF is launching an emergency appeal to fund nutrition and health programmes in Bahr El Ghazal, southern Sudan,” the organisation said in a statement, adding that the appeal was set-up “to pay for medical and nutritional supplies, including medicines, milk, sugar, oil, high-protein biscuits and feeding equipment.”

“About 350,000 people are currently at risk in the region, including 120,000 people displaced by the recent fighting and now unable to harvest their crops,” MSF pointed out, adding that some 7,000 children were being “treated at the MSF health centres.”

On his part, MSF’s head of mission for Bahr El Ghazal, Marc Hermant, warned that the Sudanese people were “at risk of dying from easily preventable diseases such as diarrhoea and malaria.”

Many countries, including Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have sent aid to Sudan, in an effort to support the flood-hit country to revive. Since last June, the floods have led to the death of 121 people and injured 54 others.

On 5 September, the Sudanese Security and Defence Council declared a state of emergency throughout the country for a period of three months to prevent the effects of floods. It declared the country a “natural disaster area”.

READ: Sudan’s devastating floods will happen again and again without international support