PARIS, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- French health minister Agnes Buzyn announced Wednesday that public health authorities would investigate dozens of cases of babies born either without arms or malformed ones in rural parts of the country.
"Following the alert, I asked for a new investigation," the minister told BFMTV news channel, adding that the first conclusions of the probing would be unveiled by the end of January 2019.
"We have asked to have the entire (results) of the inquiry before June. The complexity is to go back in the history of these families on cases that sometimes date from more than ten years ago," she added.
Earlier this week, public health authorities announced there had been an additional 11 cases reported in the Ain department of eastern France between 2000 and 2014. Similar incidents have already been unveiled in Brittany and the Loire-Atlantique areas. Last week, the health minister announced a new inquiry into the birth defects of 14 babies born since 2007.
"I want to know, I think all of France wants to know. We have to know where these women carried out their pregnancy, if it was in the department, or if it was elsewhere, " Buzyn said.
"We do not want to close any tracks. It's possibly an environmental cause. Maybe it's what they ate, what they drank, what they breathed. Today, I do not know," she added.
Public Health France and the national agency for health security ANSES that jointly conduct the probe "have to go back to the mothers, try to understand the common points that could exist between all these families," Buzyn said.
