WHEN Carlyn Dooley’s three-year-old daughter Paisley was diagnosed with stage four cancer, the prognosis was heartbreakingly bleak, with doctors explaining “she wasn’t going to see the weekend”.
But after successfully campaigning for further treatment, the brave mum says she was just as rocked by what medical professionals remarked about her child’s rare diagnosis – one that raised her suspicions about a second sickening scandal to hit the UK’s so-called ‘Toxic Town’.
She explains: “I want to get answers. The cancer that Paisley has, only 100 children in the UK are supposed to get it each year but I’ve known quite a handful now in Corby.”
Multiple women in Corby, Northants, have revealed to The Sun how doctors were baffled by the types of aggressive cancer they or their children had been diagnosed with.
They are speaking out now following the publicity around the TV series Toxic Town starring Dr Who’s Jodie Whittaker, which looked back on the true story of a group of mums whose children were born with deformities due to dangerous waste materials blowing from open top trucks.
This different set of residents believe that waste was buried all over the town, including in a pond, when the only official site became too full.
One medical study has suggested that parents that are exposed to heavy metal toxins from the ground for just eight hours a day for three months are 38 per cent more likely to have a child with cancer.
This new group is being represented by solicitor Des Collins, who was portrayed by Rory Kinnear in the Netflix show.
Alison Gaffney, 36, who is leading the campaign with her husband Andy Hinde, 38, has been investigating childhood cancer links in Corby since her eight-year-old son Fraser was diagnosed with leukaemia.
She fears it will take time to get to the truth.
Alison tells The Sun: “I think it’s an environmental scandal with poisoned kids.
“We have been through the depths of hell with Fraser’s journey. So we’re ready for the fight.
“We’re ready for the length of the fight because these children deserve answers.”
Fraser survived despite doctors repeatedly misdiagnosing his symptoms.
During his treatment, Alison was struck by how many people she knew in the town who had rare childhood cancers.
She started a campaign group and is now in touch with 130 people from Corby who had them.
So far 50 have filled in questionnaires about their cases – and of those, seven of the children have died.
Due to complex statistics they have not yet been able to establish with certainty that the rate of these potentially fatal conditions is significantly above the national average.
The case is not yet ready to go to court and they are still gathering evidence.
Fatal prognosis
Carlyn’s daughter Paisley is the most recent child in the group to have faced death.
Two months after Paisley was diagnosed with high risk stage four neuroblastoma in April, she was told there was no hope of survival.
Carlyn reveals: “We got told on June 29 she was going to die. We got told she wasn’t going to see the weekend.
“She’d had a massive bleed on the brain which obviously caused her to seizure and we got sent to a hospice for her to die.”
But Paisley’s parents believed she had a chance and insisted the doctors should make every effort to save her.
Mother-of-two Carlyn, 26, who is now a full-time carer, says: “Me and her dad fought to get her back on active treatment because at first we were told they could only prolong things.
“We said ‘why can’t we try chemotherapy’ and that’s what they’ve done.”
The disease is now stable and the bleed on the brain is receding.
What makes Carlyn suspicious is that doctors at her local hospital in Kettering were so surprised by the type of cancer Paisley had.
It is an experience echoed by 37-year-old Karen Young.
Aged 22, she was diagnosed with an acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, which is normally found in children.
One doctor said to her: “How can you possibly have this?”
Karen, who was born and raised in Corby, was put on an adult ward at Leicester Royal Infirmary, where the team were surprised by the amount of patients from Corby.
A beautiful Corby girl that’s been lost for no reason
Karen Young
Karen recalls: “You’ve got every other nurse that comes into the room going. ‘Oh, you’re from Corby as well. That’s really strange. Oh, I’ve not long dealt with a person from Corby’.”
They included a girl Karen knew from her school, who tragically did not survive.
She continues: “Within about four weeks of me getting diagnosed there was another girl that went to the same school as me, one year and one month older than me, who got diagnosed with exactly the same very, very rare form of childhood cancer.
“A beautiful Corby girl that’s been lost for no reason.”
Karen, who worked in an office and was going to train to be a first responder, has not been able to return to work due to her illness.
She says: “I’ve got bits missing out of my spine, chronic fatigue syndrome, severe anxiety, depression and PTSD. I won’t ever get an all-clear.”
But Karen was able to have two children, aged one and nine, who she says “are my life… they are my reason for keeping going”.
Now Karen hopes that Corby can be made safe for future generations.
She says: “People are worried about bringing up children because of what’s under the ground. Everybody is anxious. Everybody is on edge. Everybody wants to know what’s there.”
Toxic earth
Another mum looking for answers is Tiffany Drummond, 31, who was born in Scotland but moved to Corby at the age of two around the time the toxic waste was being buried.
Her son Mason, ten, needed three surgeries in order to survive blood cancer after being diagnosed in October 2019. He has been in remission for three years.
Tiffany says: “There are so many cases in Corby. We need to find out what is going on.”
The man trying to find answers is Des Collins.
People are worried about bringing up children because of what’s under the ground
Karen Young
It was his dogged investigations that led Mr Justice Akenhead to rule in 2009 that the Corby Borough council was “extensively negligent” in the way it transported waste from the steelworks.
The result was that 19 families received £14.6million in compensation.
An internal council report showed that high levels of zinc, arsenic, boron and nickel had spread across the town.
Yet officials had maintained there was “no link” between the deformities and the waste materials until they lost in court.
A new fight
Corby Borough Council has now been replaced by North Northamptonshire Council and Des is again finding it difficult to get answers.
When the British steel plant was dismantled, the toxic waste was supposed to all go into Deene Quarry.
But the quarry wasn’t big enough and the allegation is that contractors buried it across Corby in an unsafe way between 1996 and 1997.
Alison’s own father, who was employed by the steelworks, told her he was asked to dump some in a pond.
She reveals: “My dad told me ‘it was part of my job, I went on dumper trucks without a license for driving it through town, and we just had to dump all this toxic waste and parts of the building into these ponds’.”
Des has an Environment Agency report which shows the council was told not to stockpile waste around Deene Quarry.
Des explains: “We know when it was there. We know when it disappeared. But we don’t know where it is.
“So that’s why we start this by writing to the council and saying ‘tell us where it is. You tell us where it is. We’ll test it.’
“They write back and say basically they don’t say they know where it is. And they basically say we don’t think it’s in the public interest to let you know.”
The problem for the council is that some of the original documents were destroyed or proper records weren’t kept in the first place.
Des alleges: “Throughout the history of this land reclamation there was a lot of fly-tipping and a lot of people taking backhanders. It was never documented.”
A survey of potentially contaminated land was carried out in 2001 and this is publicly available, but Des doesn’t think this is adequate.
He wants more information.
North Northamptonshire Council told The Sun in a statement: “The request from Collins Solicitors that is referred to was in relation to a list of all sites that are potentially contaminated and have not been designated as contaminated and included on our public register.
“The council has outlined that it is these sites that would not be provided or disclosed into the public domain under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.”
