Illustration of a newborn baby holding his mother’s hand. – SIPA
The mystery remains unsolved. The expert committee tasked with examining the possible causes of babies born without arms or with a malformed limb in Morbihan has not found an explanation for these birth defects. The news was made official Thursday by the health authorities, three years after the revelation of grouped cases of babies in Guidel, but also in Loire-Atlantique and Ain.
The publicity of these grouped cases had been accelerated by the publication of the book Strange coincidences written by Isabelle Taymans-Grassin, doctor and mother of a girl born with a disability in 2012 in Lorient. The mother of the girl born without forearms recounts her struggle, shared with a dozen other families, to try to identify the cause of this malformation. Most of the families were concentrated around Guidel.
For Morbihan, where four grouped cases had been identified, the additional work of the committee of experts “did not make it possible to identify exposure to a risk factor common to these pregnancies or an overexposure at risk in the environment. of residence of the families of the cluster of transverse agenesis of the upper limbs (ATMS) ”, specify these institutions.
No additional investigations in Loire-Atlantique
As for Loire-Atlantique, “the cluster made up of two children with ATMS, born in the same year in the same town, is statistically confirmed”, the press release continues, but the experts “do not recommend carrying out additional investigations. in an attempt to retrospectively characterize maternal exposures during pregnancy ”, given in particular the low number and the age of the cases, as well as the absence of a cause identified for the Brittany cluster.
On the other hand, “the investigations carried out on these clusters have highlighted the need to strengthen the system for monitoring congenital anomalies in France and to improve knowledge of their risk factors in order to put in place targeted preventive actions”, conclude the health authorities, who recall that measures have already been taken to this end.
The committee was set up in early 2019 as part of the case of babies born with a malformed arm in France – a phenomenon that has affected around twenty families – to try to determine the causes of the malformations. If they had concluded in July of the same year to “the absence of excess cases” in Ain, they had wanted to conduct additional investigations in Brittany. Before the creation of this committee, Public Health France had already indicated that it had not identified any cause for the suspected grouped cases and had considered that there was no “excess of cases” in Ain.