Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has urged Sudan's health and political authorities to lift the barriers and administrative blockages preventing vaccines from entering Darfur, after its teams treated close to 30,000 people for vaccine-preventable diseases across the war-torn region in just over two years. In a new report, Vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks in Darfur, released this week, MSF says the collapse of routine immunisation — not a shortage of vaccines in the world — is what is driving repeated measles and whooping cough outbreaks, and that it is itself unable to import vaccines for either routine immunisation or emergency responses in Sudan.

Source: MSF report and press release, Nov 4-5; Doctors Without Borders USA, Nov 4

Outbreaks that never fully ended

MSF says transmission recurred over consecutive years in Tawila, El Geneina, Rokero, Zalingei, Nyala and East Jebel Marra, suggesting immunity gaps have persisted despite outbreak responses and that outbreaks were never fully contained. South Darfur saw the sharpest recent surge, with 10,600 suspected measles cases in the first four months of 2026 alone, exceeding its total for all of 2025. In Central Darfur, routine vaccination largely stopped in 2023 as the war cut power and supplies and broke the cold chain that keeps vaccines effective. "Our teams are constantly treating children for diseases that could have been prevented with a vaccine," said Sebastián Traficante, MSF's emergency coordinator in Darfur.

Source: Doctors Without Borders USA, Nov 4; MSF report, Nov 5

The Darfur figures sit inside one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. With Sudan's war in its fourth year, MSF says 34 million people need humanitarian aid in 2026 and 21 million cannot access essential medical care because of the collapse of the health system; according to the World Health Organization figures cited by MSF, 37 percent of health facilities across Sudan are non-functional. Mass displacement, damaged infrastructure, disrupted services and restricted humanitarian access have compounded the immunisation collapse across Darfur's four states covered by the report.

Source: Doctors Without Borders Canada, Nov 5 (MSF report; WHO figures cited)

What happens next

MSF's ask is specific: restore routine immunisation as a system, not only emergency campaigns, fund vaccination, and remove the import restrictions that keep vaccines out of Darfur even where existing systems cannot meet needs. Emergency campaigns can blunt an outbreak, the organisation argues, but without a working routine programme — power, cold chain, supplies and access — the same towns will keep generating the same outbreaks. Whether Sudanese authorities act on the import blockages is now the decision to watch.