An unknown disease has killed more than 50 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to doctors.

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Africa office said the first outbreak was discovered in the town of Boloko, in the northwest of the country.

It is reported that three children ate a bat and died following haemorrhagic fever symptoms.

The interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been 48 hours in the majority of cases.

“That’s what’s really worrying,” Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring centre, told the news agency, The Associated Press.

The outbreak began on 21 January and 419 cases have been recorded including 53 deaths.

There was a second outbreak of the mystery illness in the town of Bomate on 9 February.

Samples from 13 cases have been sent for testing to the National Institute for Biomedical Research in the DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, the WHO said.

All samples have been negative for Ebola or other common haemorrhagic fever diseases like Marburg. Some tested positive for malaria.

Last year, another mystery flu-like illness which killed dozens of people in another part of Congo was considered likely to be malaria.

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Scientists have had concerns for a long time about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where wild animals are eaten.

The number of these types of outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60% in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022.

Harun is sitting hunched on a bed with a sheet over his head.

He lives in a state of psychosis and wants to return to his home in central Khartoum.

He tells us where to turn and which bridges to cross to get him there.

The war has ripped away the stability that kept him sane and permeates the mental illness that now haunts his days.

“I have 37 bullets still inside me and a sniper shot me in my legs. I took 251 bullets in my legs and hip,” he says after lifting the blanket and pointing to parts of his body that show no signs of harm.

He may not have been wounded but he is deeply scarred.

We find him in a shelter for discharged hospital patients who cannot return home.

In a tented corner in the yard outside his ward, there are men nursing gunshot wounds and amputated limbs.

Badreldeen was trapped in the Shambat neighbourhood of Khartoum North as it was occupied by paramilitary fighters and militiamen belonging to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

“I told the RSF that we are not army soldiers. We are civilians but they just fired at us,” he says looking down at his bandaged leg.

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As the RSF battles Sudan’s military for control of the capital and country, millions have been displaced and dispossessed with tens of thousands of people killed, injured and detained.

He adds: “In Shambat, lots of people died. Five people were killed in our street alone.”

Shambat is a residential district in Khartoum North – the northeastern wing of Sudan’s tri-capital known as Bahri – that has now been fully reclaimed by the military.

Some are slowly returning to their devastated homes in once-occupied areas and others wounded and brutalised under siege are flooding hospitals in the capital’s old city Omdurman.

The sounds of shells whizz over us as we move through Bahri’s southern edges.

Gunfire rings out aimed at positions just across the Blue Nile.

The turning road to Kober Bridge and into Khartoum is bordered by a residential compound full of identical bullet-riddled orange blocks.

The charred, chewed-out corners of some of the buildings are a harsh break from uniformity.

The bridge is still intact but its base is a haunting scene.

An abandoned RSF position where blackened car bodies and beds are surrounded by stolen household items and hundreds of bullet and shrapnel shells.

A wedding dress and baby photos sit among the used ammunition.

The remnants of life ripped out of the surrounding homes and discarded.

We walk into a family home north of the bridge in Bahri and see what fills the houses instead.

Everything is turned over – couches, toy cars, roller skates, dishes.

Even the electric cables are ripped out of the walls.

The corner of the living room is burnt by the wood broken off the antique furniture.

The clothes, cushions and anything of little monetary value are dumped in the centre of the room into a rubbish heap.

Shells boom as we leave the wreckage of the home and motorcycles with steely-eyed army soldiers whizz by on their way to the nearest front.

A military victory may be imminent in Sudan’s capital but a long road to restoration and recovery still lies ahead.

You can watch a special programme on Sudan tonight on The World with Yalda Hakim from 9pm on Sky News.

Yousra Elbagir reports from Khartoum North with camera Garwen McLuckie and producers Nkululeko Zulu and Chris Cunningham

Did you know there’s a critical product – one without which we’d all be dead – which Europe is actually importing more of from Russia now than before the invasion of Ukraine?

It might feel a bit pointless, given how much chat there is right now about the end of the Ukraine war, to spend a moment talking about economic sanctions and how much of a difference they actually made to the course of the war.

After all, financial markets are already beginning to price in the possibility of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Wholesale gas prices – the ones which change every day in financial markets as opposed to the ones you pay at home – have fallen quite sharply in the past couple of weeks. European month-ahead gas prices are down 22% in the past fortnight alone. And – a rare piece of good news – if that persists it should eventually feed into utility bills, which are due to rise in April, mostly because they reflect where prices used to be, as opposed to where they are now.

But it’s nonetheless worth pondering sanctions, if for no other reason than they have almost certainly influenced the course of the war. When it broke out, we were told that economic sanctions would undermine Russia‘s economy, making it far harder for Vladimir Putin to wage war. We were told that Russia would suffer on at least four fronts – it would no longer be able to buy European goods, it would no longer be able to sell its products in Europe, it would face the seizure of its foreign assets and its leading figures would face penalties too.

The problem, however, is that there has been an enormous gap between the promise and the delivery on sanctions. European goods still flow in large quantities to Russia, only via the backdoor, through Caucasus and Central Asian states instead of directly. Russian oil still flows out around the world, though sanctions have arguably reduced prices somewhat.

The upshot is Russia has still been able to depend on billions of euros of revenue from Europe, with which it has been able to spend billions of euros on components sourced, indirectly, from Europe. Its ability to wage war does not seem to have been curtailed half as much as was promised back in 2022. That in turn has undoubtedly had an impact on Russia’s success on the battlefield. The eventual peace deal is, at least to some extent, a consequence of these leaky sanctions, and of Europe’s reluctance to wage economic war, as opposed to just talking about it.

A stark example is to be found when you dig deeper into what’s actually happened here. On the face of it, one area of success for sanctions is to be seen in Europe’s gas imports. Back before the conflict, around half of all the EU’s imported gas came from Russia. Today that’s down to around 20%.

But now consider what that gas was typically used for. Much of it was used to heat peoples’ homes – and with less of it around, prices have gone sharply higher – as we are all experiencing. But the second biggest chunk of usage was in the industrial sector, where it was used to fire up factories and as a feedstock for the chemicals industry. And that brings us back to the mystery product Europe is now importing more of than before the invasion.

One of the main chemicals produced from gas is ammonia, a nitrogen-based chemical mostly used in fertilisers. Ammonia is incredibly important – without it, we wouldn’t be able to feed around half of the population. And since gas prices rose sharply, Europe has struggled to produce ammonia domestically, turning off its plants and relying instead on imports.

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Which raises a question: where have most of those imports come from? Well, in the UK, which has imposed a clear ban on Russian chemical imports, they have come mostly from the US. But in Europe, they are mostly coming from Russia. Indeed, according to our analysis of European trade data, flows of nitrogen fertilisers from Russia have actually increased since the invasion of Ukraine. More specifically, in the two-year pre-pandemic period from 2018 to 2019, Europe imported 4.6 million tonnes, while the amount imported from Russia in 2023-24 was 4.9 million tonnes.

It raises a deeper concern: instead of weaning itself off Russian imports, did Europe end up shifting its dependence from one category of import (gas) to another (fertiliser)? The short answer, having looked at the trade data, is a pretty clear yes.

Something to bear in mind, next time you hear a European leader lecturing others around the world about their relations with Russia.