Cairo ? New research on the conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region shows that more than 80 percent of the 300,000 deaths since fighting began in 2003 were the result of disease, not violence.

The findings, published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet, suggest many among the millions of people uprooted could remain at great risk of succumbing to the malnutrition, diarrhea and waterborne diseases that have ravaged their squalid refugee camps even as fighting has ebbed.

Fighting between rebels and Sudanese government forces began in Darfur in 2003, driving 2.7 million people from their homes and creating an enormous humanitarian crisis in the vast desert region.