Rennes (AFP)

Mother of a little Charlotte, born in 2012 in Lorient (Morbihan) without a left forearm, Isabelle Taymans-Grassin tells in a book her long fight, with ten other families, to try to identify the cause of this malformation, faced with the inertia of public health institutions.

"When Charlotte arrived in our life, and we discovered her handicap, we received a big slap," testifies the author in her work entitled "D'trange coïncidences" (Cherche Midi), to be published on Tuesday.

An upheaval all the greater since none of the three prenatal ultrasounds had made it possible to detect the malformation. "We may hate the idea but the image of an amputation was there, violent, brutal," writes this general practitioner, who lives in Brussels after having lived Guidel, 11,000 inhabitants, in Morbihan.

In this testimony which she presents to AFP as "a written record" for her daughter, Isabelle Taymans-Grassin delivers all the emotions experienced in the months following her birth: distress, tears, feeling of abandonment and guilt. "It was obvious: we didn't do well + made + our daughter," she wrote.

At the maternity hospital, no doctor is able to explain the reasons for the malformation. The gynecologist who gave birth to him "immediately turned back, as if frightened by what he noticed". The one who followed her pregnancy tries to clear himself by explaining that Charlotte "lost" her forearm at the end of pregnancy ...

"I was beginning to anticipate the lies that would now litter our search for the truth," said the mother. If the family has grown in 2014 and the parents have accepted the "little arm" of their daughter, the questions remain.

When the couple discovered in 2015, thanks to an association, the existence of two other children born at the same time as Charlotte and carrying the same malformation, it was a new shock.

- Reign of "concealment" -

"Three identical cases, as close in space as in time: this was what is called a + cluster," explains Isabelle Taymans-Grassin. With one case of malformation per 10,000 births, three babies malformed in 18 months in the same municipality cannot, statistically, be chance.

For this doctor, this is an opportunity to find a common cause, especially since she learns of the existence of other "grouped cases" in Loire-Atlantique and in Ain, highlighted by the Remera, the only independent register among the six responsible for recording congenital malformations in France. In all, around fifteen children are affected.

After two years during which "nothing happened", the media took over the affair in the fall of 2018, when Emmanuelle Amar, general manager of Remera, sounded the alarm.

"There was a real political impetus to set up an investigation, an expert committee and an orientation committee with the families. But since things have calmed down in the media, the investigation has stalled, the steering committee has been dissolved and families no longer have access to information, "said Charlotte's mother.

"There was a semblance of an investigation which consisted of looking at the quality of air or water in the databases. It is really very light, because it is not because it is not not in the scientific literature that it does not exist ", continues the author, who says" furious ".

Lack of independence of experts, lack of rigor, manipulated statistics, communication war, "concealment reigns in every way", criticizes Ms. Taymans-Grassin, for whom the authorities seek "to hide their inaction for years" .

Admittedly, the malformations only concern a small number of children, who "are in good health", she acknowledges, but that nonetheless constitutes "a real scientific challenge in terms of finding the causes".

Among the hypotheses raised, that of pesticides comes up regularly, but it could "be quite another thing", admits the author, who intends to continue the fight "for Charlotte, so that she can never doubt that I have everything tried to elucidate the origin of his handicap. "

© 2020 AFP