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Before becoming a local politician, Assunta Gelgetile was a nurse in Marsabit, northern Kenya. During that time, she saw many patients, mainly women and children, having difficulty swallowing solids. She would refer the cases to Marsabit County hospital dozens of miles away, where further tests revealed the patients had throat cancer.
“I reasoned that this must be related to the food or water people were consuming,” she told DeSmog. After detecting a trend, she asked the authorities to help “investigate what exactly was the cause of the cancer that was causing so many deaths,” she said.
