The compensation commission for child victims of prenatal exposure to pesticides established a causal link between Sabine Grataloup’s exposure to glyphosate, while she was pregnant, and her son’s illness.
“It’s a huge relief to see that this has finally been recognised.” Sabine Grataloup, the mother of Théo, born in 2007 with a serious malformation of the trachea and esophagus, announced to France Télévisions, Monday October 9, that the Compensation Fund for Pesticide Victims had issued an opinion in its favor. For the first time, the compensation commission for child victims of prenatal exposure to pesticides – which is part of this fund – establishes a causal link between the exposure to glyphosate of Sabine Grataloup, while she was pregnant with Théo, and his son’s malformation.
The Grataloup family alerted the authorities in 2009, pointing out the responsibility of a generic product from Roundup, the Glyper, in the illness from which Théo suffers, who has lived with a tracheotomy, a hole in his throat, since he was 3 months old. The amount of compensation represents approximately 36,000 euros. “We didn’t do this for the moneyassures Sabine Grataloup. We are carefully setting aside this money, which Théo will receive when he comes of age.”
“We could no longer be silent”
The commission’s decision was rendered in March 2022. Although the Grataloup could have revealed it immediately, they preferred to keep the information confidential to protect themselves from the numerous hateful messages of which they were the target on social networks when they met. are exposed in the media, in 2017 and 2019. Even Théo was only informed last week, specifies Sabine Grataloup. She decided to reveal this decision after learning that the European Commission had proposed, in September, to extend the authorization of glyphosate within the EU for ten years. “I cried. I said to myself: ‘but it’s not possible, they don’t understand anything!'”
She hopes to influence the vote of European Union member states on the authorization of glyphosate, which must take place on Friday October 13. “We could no longer remain silent. We could not let politicians and journalists continue to say that there was no problem with glyphosate.”
“Behind the statistics, there are families, sick people (…) We speak out so that decision-makers take into account the people who are suffering.”
Sabine Grataloupat franceinfo
Théo suffers from esophageal atresia, as Sabine Grataloup explained to France 3 Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, in 2017. At birth, her son’s esophagus “descended towards the stomach but did not reach it. It ended in a dead end. Everything he swallowed came back up, passed through the trachea and went into the lungs”she described.
This malformation affects around 200 children per year in France. At 3 months, Théo underwent a tracheotomy. “During the first six years, (…) there was a permanent vital risk”, relates his mother. Until he was 6 years old, Théo lived with a cannula, a small tube, in his trachea. “You had to suck into the cannula about every ten minutes during the day, with a pump. And at night, every three-quarters of an hour. It was very, very heavy.”
Théo’s quality of life improved when he was able to start eating normally, around the age of 6. Before that, he was fed through nutrient bags connected to his stomach by a tube, a process called gastrostomy.
At 11 years old, Théo has already undergone 53 surgical procedures. Apart from his voice, metallic due to the absence of vocal cords, he claimed, in an issue of “Special Envoy”, in 2019, to lead an almost normal life, except in sports classes. (Find the extract from 34 minutes in the report below).
Now in first general class, Théo is 16 years old. He plans to get into the restaurant business and join the Lyfe Institute (formerly the Paul-Bocuse Institute). “It’s quite surprising for someone who couldn’t eat normally before the age of 6”comments Sabine Grataloup.
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After Theo’s birth, his mother wonders about the cause of the malformation which affects her son. A doctor replies that the rare studies carried out point to “towards a slight overexposure of families, statistically, to herbicides and pesticides”, she remembers. But these studies were based on insufficient statistical bases, she adds.
Above all, the family does not seem to be exposed to these products. “We live in the countryside. Around us, there are meadows with cows, horses and forest. There are no crops within a radius of 500 m or 1 kmshe explains. And It turns out that, by choice, we have been eating organic for around ten years. So there, really, a bad choice. We say to ourselves that it must be something else.”
Weeding at the start of pregnancy
But Sabine Grataloup ends up having something click. Théo was then 14 months old. At the end of August 2008, this professional in the world of equestrian travel found herself at “use a glyphosate-based weedkiller, a generic of Roundupon [sa] riding career. However, the previous year, when she was a few weeks pregnant without knowing it, she had performed the same operation. “Theo’s surgeon told us that it was a malformation that occurred very early in the pregnancy”, she says. For her, this is the only time she could have been overexposed to herbicide.
“I applied glyphosate over 700 m2 exactly when the esophagus and trachea were forming. It’s a very, very precise moment at the end of the first month of pregnancy.”
Sabine Grataloupto “Special Envoy”
The family sued Monsanto, the producer of Roundup, in May 2018. “We must do it, above all for Théo who will have to face the consequences of his exposure all his life in utero to a product that should not have been on the marketshe wrote then. We must also do it to protect future children, given the difficulty for politicians to react effectively and independently to this threat to public health.”
The procedure aimed “to establish the respective responsibility of the manufacturers of glyphosate implicated in congenital malformations” of Théo, specified the family’s lawyers. In the court summons, several doctors’ certificates suggest a possible link between the malformations and the glyphosate-based herbicide, specified “Special Envoy”. The decision of the compensation commission for child victims of prenatal exposure to pesticides could change the situation. In the meantime, the procedure against Monsanto (and its buyer Bayer) continues.