Heiban Locality in the Nuba Mountains has run out of medicine. The district’s sick and injured primarily have to travel to the neighboring Kauda area to seek treatment.

“We have run out of medicine,” physician’s assistant Omar Musa Korman told Radio Tamazuj at Heiban clinic on Thursday .

Patients coming to the clinic often suffer from diarrheas, amoebas, and malnutrition, he said. But there are no drugs and many of the clinic’s medical staff have either left or do not come to work anymore.

Korman raised the matter to the attention of the SPLM-N health secretary in Kauda, but the authorities have no way to support the hospital, he said. Neither are there any aid organizations that help.

“We don’t have anything,” he noted. The church hospital in Gidel, however, is supplied with medicines, so the Heiban clinic is able to refer patients there.

Heiban health center is equipped with a laboratory, pharmacy and other machines, Korman noted, but many of them cannot now be used.

Questioned about the humanitarian situation, the locality commissioner Kamal Al Nour Daoud said “we as authorities have a dialogue with the local organizations. But the local or national organizations have the same problems because they have no means, they have no external support.”

Photo: Heiban health center laboratory, 8 February 2013 (Radio Tamazuj)