Sudan floods bring threat of disease

Record flooding in east Africa has made hundreds of thousands of people homeless in Sudan, with millions more at risk as the rising water of the Nile threatens to inundate Khartoum, spreading disease and overwhelming sanitation services.

Figure 1.

One of thousands of families made homeless by flooding in Kassala

Credit: ABD RAUF/AP

Kassala, the largest town in eastern Sudan, has been declared a disaster zone, with 80% of the population homeless after the River Qash overflowed on 28 July. Sudan's Red Crescent organisation has reported that the city hospital and main water plant are out of action. “The health situation is alarming, with a fivefold increase in cases of acute diarrhoea,” it said, adding that the area has twice the seasonal caseload of malaria and warning that millions more are threatened as rains continue unabated.

Dr Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development, said: “Such record breaking events around the globe show that climate change is already impacting on us and is having negative effects on people's health across the world.”

Climate changes are increasing the number of weather related disasters, according to the Red Cross's World Disasters Report 2003, published in July: “Weather-related disasters continue to rise, from an annual average of 200 between 1993-1997, to 331 per year between 1998-2002... Floods, however, affected more people across the globe (140 million per year on average) than all other natural or technological disasters put together,” it said.

“Climate change seeks out the people living on the margins of survival,” said Dr Mick Kelly of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit. “It's often a cumulative process as the current Sudanese floods demonstrate. Falling agricultural productivity pushes people into marginal lands, leading to deforestation of highlands that causes flooding below.”

Environmental pressures lead to increased competition for land, and people move to areas where they don't have experience of particular diseases, he said.

Sudan has had several outbreaks of leishmaniasis, which killed tens of thousands of Nuer cattle herders who were pushed into previously uninhabited land and had no idea of the threat.

“As the climate changes, it is inevitable that there should be a shift in the pattern of infectious diseases,” said Dr Kelly.