Rainy season acute watery diarrhoea response efforts ramp up in South and Central Darfur

WHO staff in South Darfur fight AWD with the help of local communities (Photo: Afeef Mohamed Ali/WHO Sudan)

With Sudan’s rainy season underway, the risk of AWD spreading more quickly has increased. Potential risk factors include increasing breeding sites for insects, decreasing quality of water and sanitation facilities, and the possibility of worsening faecal and food hygiene.

In South and Central Darfur, the past few weeks have seen some of the highest weekly numbers of new reported AWD cases and deaths, despite Sudan’s Health Ministry’s , WHO and partners ongoing strenuous efforts to stem the outbreak.

Towards zero cases: experts from Bangladesh share decades of AWD knowledge with Sudanese responders

Trainers, participants and WHO staff at today’s AWD management training, making the “zero cases” hand gesture (Photo: Simon van Woerden/WHO Sudan)

12 September, 2017 - Today in Khartoum, a team of experts from WHO’s partner the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh (icddr,b) trained the first of two batches of 35 local health practitioners on how to manage and contain the AWD outbreak in the country. The training of trainers will support the ongoing response to the Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) outbreak by WHO and Sudan’s Health Ministry, by giving the practitioners new expertise to use in their crucial and life-saving response activities across the country.

The experts from icddr,b, which is a WHO Collaborating Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, will share their decades long expertise with participants over the course of five days of intensive workshops. Sessions focus especially on AWD surveillance, prevention and case management.

Participants, in turn, have been carefully selected by Sudan’s Health Ministry and WHO to represent the best of the country’s AWD responders. Already during the first few days, participants raised many issues and challenges related to surveillance, case management including comorbidities, CTC and ORS corner management, water and sanitation, and laboratory scale up - to name just a few.

Instruction exercises include presentation, discussions, simulations and photo and video exercises where the trainees are asked to assess the health status of patients, and to indicate and analyse problems they can see in the health facilities depicted in the audiovisual materials.

The experts have a combined public health experience of several decades, which they will transfer to the local practitioners during the five days. After the course concludes, the local health staff in turn are expected to train their colleagues in the health facilities where they work, creating a snowball effect and reducing the death toll that AWD exacts across Sudan.