On one street in a quiet green town of patriarchal England, nine children with severe anomalies have already been born. It was suspected that their mothers had been poisoned with herbicides.
Now almost every pregnant woman in Northfleet, Kent, is afraid of having a baby who is diagnosed with a birth defect called gastroschisis. It causes anomalies in the development of internal organs even at the moment when the baby is in the womb. Under normal conditions, gastroschisis is found in one out of every 7,000 children.
But in Northfleet, the disease has become something of a local curse. The town is located in the midst of nature, among the greenery of flooded meadows and woods. Those who have been here cannot even think of poisoning or bad ecology. Nevertheless, local mothers show photographs of their babies to journalists who have come from London, who from the first days of their lives fell into the hands of doctors and ended up in intensive care. Everyone is diagnosed with gastroschisis, in which the intestines grow not from the inside, but from the outside of the body. The sight is not for the faint of heart.
All nine families live on the same quiet, green street in England, and not at all in the center of Chernobyl. There are too many cases of gastroschisis for a single street for a simple coincidence, so the locals already have their own version. There is talk of poisoning with a herbicide called atrazine, which kills weeds. Although the use of this substance was banned in the EU back in 2004, an increased concentration of atrazine was recorded in fields less than a kilometer from Northfleet in 2008.
In 2010, scientists from the University of Washington concluded that women living less than 25 kilometers from the areas treated with atrazine are more at risk of giving birth to a baby with gastroschisis. And here in Kent we see a living confirmation of this.