More than 120 people have died of cholera in western Chad and nearly 3,000 cases of the water-borne disease have been reported since an epidemic broke out at the start of the rainy season in mid-June, the government told relief agencies this week. "At yesterday’s coordination meeting, the Chadian authorities said they had recorded 2,895 cases of cholera and 123 deaths throughout the territory," Geneviève Salise, the Cholera Coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Belgium told IRIN by telephone from the Chadian capital N’djamena.

The main health concerns facing displaced people in Darfur and their host communities include: malnutrition, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria, hepatitis E and conflict-related trauma. The possibility of outbreaks of communicable diseases is particularly elevated. This is due to risk factors including limited amounts of potable water, low standards of environmental hygiene, declining nutritional status, and low vaccination coverage. Twelve communicable diseases and health events are being monitored by the Early Warning Alert and Response Network (EWARN) established by WHO, and implemented by a network of health care groups throughout the three Darfur States.

The UN refugee agency has heard that the continuing insecurity in western Sudan's Darfur region could drive some 30,000 people into Chad, a new influx that could strain UNHCR's ability to care for the refugees in its swelling camps.

Dust storms emanating from the Sahara have increased tenfold in 50 years, contributing to climate change as well as threatening human health and destroying coral reefs thousands of miles away. And one major cause is the replacement of the camel by four-wheel drive vehicles as the desert vehicle of choice. Andrew Goudie, professor of geography at Oxford University, blames the vehicles for destroying a thin crust of lichen and stones that has protected vast areas of the Sahara from the wind for centuries.

There has been an upsurge of Sudanese refugees fleeing across the border into Chad following reports of renewed violence in the Darfur region. The United Nations refugee agency says up to 500 people crossed the border close to the Chadian village of Berak.

The plague of locusts sweeping south across the Sahara desert is now causing serious crop damage in Mauritania, Mali and Niger and has spread for the first time to Chad, agricultural experts and government officials said on Monday. Over the weekend, swarms of locusts invaded eastern Mali and started devouring crops, an agricultural official in the central town of Mopti said.

A cholera outbreak in and around N'djamena, the capital of Chad, has infected more than 600 people over the past month and 38 have died, an official of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Belgium said on Friday. "To date, more than 600 people have been infected by cholera and 38 have died,” Josette Benamane, the newly appointed MSF Belgium Coordinator in N'djamena, told IRIN.

Two Sudanese refugees were killed in Farchana Camp, eastern Chad, after Chadian government forces entered the camp to search for weapons following a riot on the 13 July, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) announced in a statement. The statement confirmed that the body of a man and a woman had been taken from the camp, though it was not clear whether the two were killed during the intervention by the Chadian forces.

The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that it would run out of food by the end of this month for 27,000 refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR) trapped in Chad, unless substantial contributions were made. “These refugees represent the region’s forgotten emergency,” said WFP Chad Representative and Country Director Philippe Guyon Le Bouffy. “The food stocks are exhausted. If we do not receive more funding for this operation, WFP will be forced to stop assisting these people who are reliant on food aid.”

Oxfam UK

Oxfam is seeking two programme coordinators to develop and manage the delivery of its humanitarian and development programme in Darfur. Successful candidates will have a proven record of long-term vision and strategic planning as well as proven experience of humanitarian and development planning, preferably within a chronic conflict environment.

Backed by the Sudanese government, Janjaweed militias are launching assaults across the border into Chad, attacking and looting Chadian villagers as well as refugees from Darfur, Human Rights Watch said recently. Despite a ceasefire agreement in Darfur, government troops and Janjaweed militias continue to commit atrocities in the western Sudanese region. Human Rights Watch documented at least seven cross-border incursions into Chad conducted by the Janjaweed militias since early June. The Janjaweed attack villages in Chad and refugees from Darfur, and also steal cattle. The same Arab and African ethnic groups live on both sides of border in Chad and Darfur.

On 26 May 2004, High Council for Communications (Haut conseil de la communication, HCC) President Moussa Dago threatened to order the closure of FM Liberté, a community radio station based in the capital, N'Djamena. In a letter to FM Liberté's director, the HCC president criticised the station for airing a commercial, between 19 and 25 May, in which a collective of civil society groups commented on the draft amendment to the country's Constitution. The HCC said the commercial was of a political nature, thereby violating the broadcast law governing private radio stations in the country and opening the door to penalties.

For hundreds of thousands of refugees like Souad Omar Mousa the rain that fell yesterday in the Darfur region of Sudan is something to dread. "If I was in my village, I would welcome it," she said. "But here we are exposed." Home for Mrs Mousa is now the Kalma camp, near Nyala, one of hundreds scattered throughout Darfur. Refugees live under straw matting or in the open. In what the UN describes as the world's worst humanitarian disaster, the arrival of the rains means that life for the refugees will become even more grim and the death toll will almost certainly rise.

Aid agencies are calling on the international community to take urgent action to help the growing number of Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad. More than a million mainly black Africans in Sudan's western Darfur region have been driven from their homes by gangs of Arab militia. Around 180,000 have sought sanctuary in neighbouring Chad. A representative of the UN refugee agency says the response to recent aid appeals has been disappointing. The approaching rainy season will also soon make it hard to reach those in need.

The job purpose is to provide public health support to the humanitarian programme for Sudanese Refugees in Chad and to strengthen Oxfam's response to humanitarian emergencies through specialist public health assessment and analysis.

The number of refugees who have fled to Chad to escape fighting in the Darfur area of western Sudan could be as high as 200,000, nearly double the official estimate of 110,000, Refugees International reports. The sharply higher figure is based on the observations of Refugees International advocates in Chad, as well as informal estimates by the United Nations.

A team from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) arrived in a Chadian border town to verify reports of new refugees from Sudan's western region of Darfur arriving since the beginning of the month, the UNHCR said on Tuesday. Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva, said "local authorities estimate that each week some 200 to 300 people have been crossing the border from Darfur into Chad since the beginning of the month".

A team from the United Nations refugee agency has arrived in a Chadian border town to verify reports that 200 to 300 Sudanese refugees have been crossing weekly from the Darfur region into Chad since the beginning of April, an agency spokesman said.

More than a decade after ExxonMobil - then Exxon - decided to develop the oil fields under this landlocked country of Sahara Desert and grassland, Chad's 9 million people wait expectantly. In Chad, the oil receipts that have begun to flow to the government in recent months are to be managed publicly, with 80 percent of them dedicated to pay for schools, clinics, roads and other basic human needs. Years of campaigning by Western and Chadian human rights and environmental groups forced the World Bank, oil companies and Chad's government to set up the plan, which includes a measure of oversight from nongovernmental civic organisations. But it remains to be seen if Chad will escape the curse of natural resources.

Chadian troops have successfully crossed into Darfur, western Sudan, to rescue cattle stolen by Sudanese militias known as Janjawid, according to UN sources. In the last couple of days, Chadian soldiers had crossed into Gogei, Western Darfur, to collect the cattle, following an agreement signed last week between presidents Idriss Deby of Chad and Umar al-Bashir of Sudan, sources told IRIN. The agreement allowed Chadian soldiers to cross into Sudanese territory to chase away "rebels", but was being used to chase away Janjawid militias, IRIN was told. On both sides of the largely unguarded 1,350-km border between the two countries, the military presence has reportedly increased in recent days.