KHARTOUM • It seemed little to worry about: Sudanese farmer Khadija Ahmad was planting onions when she stepped on a thorn that pierced her sandal and cut her foot.

But the thorn brought with it a flesh-eating infection, a bacterial and fungal disease called mycetoma, which rips through the body causing severe deformities.

For Ahmad, a 45-year-old from El-Fasher in western Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region, the first she knew something was wrong was when her foot swelled.

“At first, I didn’t have any pain, just a lump,” she said. “We thought it would pass.”

Mycetoma, listed as a neglected tropical disease by the United Nations’ World Health Organisation (WHO), is all too common in Sudan.

“I waited nine years before coming,” Ahmad said, as a doctor examined her at the Myce- toma Research Centre (MRC) in the capital Khartoum.

“When I arrived, it was too late,” she said, holding up her prosthetic leg in her arms. “It had to be amputated.”

She now has to take medication for life.

Sudanese have another name for the disease; the “silent death”. While few cases are fatal, mycetoma destroys the lives of its victims.

Many infected are young farmers walking barefoot in the fields, the WHO said.

For workers depending on manual labour to survive, the crippling infections act as a life sentence.

Mycetoma, caused by bacteria or fungus and entering the body usually through cuts, is a progressively destructive infectious disease of the body tissue, affecting skin, muscle and even bone.

It is often characterised by swollen feet, but it can also cause grotesque barnacle-like growths and club-like hands.

“The disease grows slowly and slyly inside the body over many years,” said Ahmad Hassan Fahal, founder of the MRC clinic.

It can manifest itself anywhere on the body, not just where the entry cut was made.

It thrives in the humid heat of tropical climates. — AFP