A malaria outbreak is sweeping through Al-Radoum locality in South Darfur, residents and medical sources have said.
The illness has torn through communities roughly 284 kilometers south of Nyala, the region’s capital, overwhelming already fragile clinics.
Three residents said that health services are collapsing as medicine prices climb beyond what most families can afford.
Drugs reach the area from South Sudan and the Sudanese cities of Nyala and Al-Daein, carried in at steep markups.
A single course of malaria treatment now costs between 6,000 and 10,000 pounds, residents said, a burden many cannot bear.
Some medicines arriving from Chad and South Sudan are cheaper, but residents say their potency is often diluted or unreliable.
A medical worker, speaking on condition of anonymity and identified only by the initials M.A., described a system stretched to breaking point.
The entire locality depends on a single government hospital staffed by just one doctor, he said.
That lone physician is left to serve thousands of patients across a wide and underserved stretch of territory.
The source warned that conditions worsen sharply each autumn, when rains turn roads to mud and cut off supply routes.
Medicine shipments to Al-Radoum grind to a halt during that season, leaving clinics to ration what little remains.
Sudan’s ongoing war has hollowed out the health system once run by the central government across Darfur.
Government-backed medical services have largely vanished from the region since fighting began, residents and aid workers say.
In their place, civilians now rely on private traders to import medicine and basic medical supplies.
That shift has driven treatment costs even higher, deepening a healthcare crisis with no clear end in sight.
