Her name is Charlotte and was born in 2012 in Lorient, in Morbihan. “When she came into our life, and we discovered her handicap, we received a big slap. The words are those of Isabelle Taymans-Grassin, who has just published a work entitled D'tranges coïncidences aux éditions du Cherche midi. The mother of the girl born without forearm recounts her fight, shared with a dozen other families, to try to identify the cause of this malformation.
In Morbihan, twelve families saw their child suffer from the same handicap, several of whom live in Guidel. Others also in the neighboring department of Loire-Atlantique. And still eight others, at least, in the yet distant department of Ain. Without a response from the authorities, little Charlotte's mother is now living in Brussels. "We may hate the idea but the image of an amputation was there, violent, brutal," writes this general practitioner.
"The investigation is at a standstill"
He will have to wait until 2015 to discover that two other children have the same symptom. “With one case of malformation per 10,000 births, three babies malformed in eighteen months in the same municipality cannot, statistically, be chance. "
The revelation of multiple cases in 2018 by Emmanuelle Amar, director general of Remera, seemed to mark the authorities' desire to find the cause of these malformations. But, a year and a half later, "the investigation is at a standstill," regrets Isabelle Taymans-Grassin, furious. “The orientation committee has been dissolved and families no longer have access to information. There was a semblance of an investigation which consisted of looking at the quality of air or water in the databases. It's really very light. "
For Charlotte's mother, the authorities seek to "hide their inaction for years". The question of pesticides has often been raised. "But it can be quite another thing," admits the author, who intends to continue the fight "for Charlotte, so that she can never doubt that I tried everything to elucidate the origin of her handicap ”.
Society
Babies born without arms: "It's not panic, but we want to know", say residents of Ain
Health
Babies born without arms: Families in Morbihan get impatient and write to the Minister
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