The country, beset by war, has the world’s lowest rates of vaccination, says the World Health Organization, as global immunisation drive also stalls.
Children in Sudan, caught up in what aid organisations have called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and threatened by rising levels of violence, are increasingly vulnerable to deadly infectious diseases as vaccinations in the country plummet.
In 2022, more than 90% of young children in Sudan received their routine vaccinations. But that figure has nearly halved to 48%, the lowest in the world, according to the World Health Organization.
Globally, more than 14 million infants remain unvaccinated and the world is not on track to meet goals of halving the number of these “zero-dose” children compared with 2019 levels by 2030, the WHO reported on Tuesday.
While misinformation and vaccine hesitancy have driven falls in immunisation in some countries, “that has not been the problem here”, said Dr Tedbabe Degefie Hailegebriel, chief of health for UNICEF Sudan . “This plummeting coverage is driven entirely by the war.”
The country’s civil war began two years ago and has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, in what the International Rescue Committee has called “the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded”.
There were 838,000 children in Sudan last year who did not receive a single dose of vaccine – the third-highest figure in the world, behind only Nigeria (2.1 million) and India (909,000).
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