Alison Gaffney believes her son’s rare leukaemia was caused by dumped toxic waste from the town’s steelworks
Alison Gaffney and Andy Hinde received the devastating news that their 17-month-old son, Fraser, had a rare type of leukaemia in 2018.
Two years of gruelling treatment followed, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy, before a stem cell transplant. Fraser, then aged three, made a “miraculous recovery” from the surgery, before doctors declared the cancer in remission.
It was at this point, as Fraser started to recover and grow stronger, that Gaffney, 36, began to look for answers. She could not stop thinking about comments made by hospital staff at the time of her son’s diagnosis. “It keeps us up at night wondering how Fraser got his cancer,” a consultant had told her.
The botched disposal of millions of tonnes of contaminated waste after the closure of Europe’s largest steelworks in Corby, Northamptonshire, in 1979 had “always been a known thing”, said Gaffney. A 2009 civil case linked the council’s negligent clean-up of the site to a string of birth defects in local children in the 1980s and 1990s. It was later dramatised in the 2025 Netflix series Toxic Town.
