(Adnkronos) – After more than two and a half years, Emergency’s pediatric center in Mayo, Sudan, reopened its doors. It had been closed in April 2023 after the start of the war due to a lack of safety conditions for staff and patients. In the first few days of opening, an average of seventy to ninety children were received daily. Among them were also malnourished children: all bear the consequences of the war on their skin. “When the war started in Sudan in April 2023, the Mayo refugee camp, 20 kilometers from Khartoum and home to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, was severely affected by attacks that deprived it of the necessary security conditions to carry out our activities,” explains Matteo D’Alonzo, Emergency program director in Sudan, in a note.
“To overcome the closure of the Mayo clinic and meet the needs that emerged during these two years of conflict, we still managed to continue care for pediatric patients by opening a pediatric center in the same compound as the Salam Center for Cardiac Surgery in the Soba district, south of Khartoum, which continues its activity with flows of seventy patients per day, but now that the situation is calmer, we are happy to be able to receive children in a place closer to where they live. In the first few days of opening, we received over two hundred minors, a sign that another intervention in favor of the pediatric population, the most affected by the conflict, was fundamental,” he adds.
Currently, five nurses, one pediatrician, one medical officer, two laboratory technicians, two pharmacists, and four cleaners are employed at the clinic. Some of them worked at the clinic before it was closed in 2023. The Mayo clinic will provide free care to children up to 14 years of age, a prenatal care and malnutrition screening program, a vaccination program, an obstetrics service to visit pregnant women, monitor their pregnancies, and offer family planning consultations. Cases requiring hospitalization will also be referred to the Pediatric Center within the Salam Center, where there is a ward that can accommodate up to sixteen inpatients.
“Of the more than two hundred children visited these days, a quarter presented critical conditions and had to be kept under observation – says Denu Fedaku, Emergency pediatrician in Mayo -. Among the most frequent diagnoses: acute malnutrition, respiratory diseases, sickle cell anemia, malaria. Among the first young patients was a six-year-old child severely malnourished and with suspected tuberculosis. Here, moreover, we see that mothers are also malnourished: the little food they have, when there is any, they give to their children.” According to the latest snapshot taken by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), 85% of the Sudanese population is between the second and fourth phases of food insecurity out of five, with a situation worsening in the Darfur region.
Hunger and malnutrition were already at record levels before the fighting; now 26 million people – half the population – are facing high levels of acute food insecurity. Currently, Sudan is among the top four countries in the world with the highest level of food insecurity, and the first in East Africa, with an estimated 3.7 million children aged between 6 and 59 months and one million pregnant and lactating women severely malnourished. It is estimated that by 2025 approximately 3.2 million children under five years of age will have suffered from acute malnutrition.
“In the second phase of the opening, in January, we will activate a second outpatient clinic, a sexual and reproductive health service, and a clinical nutrition program for children under 5 years old. – concludes D’Alonzo –. The needs are many, and we are ready to gradually reactivate all activities to return to full capacity, with the difference that the population of Mayo has now significantly increased. We must thank our Sudanese colleagues who made the restart possible and who, for more than two and a half years, have allowed us to stay here and run all our centers in the country.”
