Children in Kass Locality of Sudan’s South Darfur State have not been vaccinated against preventable diseases since mid-April, local health officials have said.
The six deadly diseases that are prevented by the vaccination are tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, polio, tuberculosis, and measles.
Speaking to Radio Tamazuj on Friday, al-Fateh Haroun Idris, who is in charge of the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in Kass Locality, said children in the area had not been vaccinated since the war erupted in April, and this is very worrying.
Al-Fateh attributed the lack of vaccines to the fact that the main storage of the vaccines in Nyala, the capital city of South Darfur State, had been looted.
Before the war, children were normally vaccinated in Kas Locality. However, we are now faced with a rather widespread problem of unvaccinated children, he added.
“There is a fear that if the children do not get vaccinated, it may cause children to lose their immunity, and this will affect the lives of many of them,” he explained.
For his part, Pediatrician Abdel-Ghaffar Ahmed believes that vaccination is necessary for children under five. He explained that childhood diseases are part of a child’s development, as the child’s immune systems learn to fight against different types of infections, and doses help strengthen immunity.
On Monday, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Sudan’s children need immediate support from the international community to prevent the country from becoming “another forgotten humanitarian catastrophe.”
children “continue to pay the highest price for a crisis not of their making – increasingly with their own lives”, said the agency in a statement.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in the Sudan conflict so far, according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
But aid groups and medics have repeatedly warned the real toll exceeds recorded figures, with many of those wounded and killed never reaching hospitals or morgues.
The war has displaced more than 4.8 million people within Sudan and has forced a further 1.2 million to flee into neighbouring countries, according to UN figures.