Human bones were discovered by workers in a garden in Saint-Denis-d’Anjou in Mayenne. According to the mayor of the town, it could be women who died of tuberculosis after the Second World War.
Big shock for the owners of a pavilion in the village of Saint-Denis-d’Anjou (Mayenne). While doing work for their future swimming pool, they came across human bones in the ground. And according to the mayor of this small town, this is not the first time this has happened.
The bones would date from more than fifty years ago
It was while digging into a concrete slab that the workers made this macabre discovery. The owners of the house then contacted the authorities and experts and a doctor came to examine the bones. According to the first observations, the bones would date from more than fifty years ago.
“There would be two or three skeletons. It is believed to be the mother and the two daughters. These bones are certainly dated more than fifty years ago. They do not date from prehistory at all, but from contemporary history unfortunately”, declares Roger Guédon, the mayor of Saint-Denis-d’Anjou in France Bleu Mayenne. According to him, these women might have been killed by tuberculosis. After the Second World War, disease had struck the village and young girls from the family of the former owners of the house had been affected. “We thought they had been in a sanatorium in Normandy, but we don’t know more,” explains the mayor.
Tuberculosis killed 1.7 million people in 2017
The bones were sent to the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie in Paris for further investigation. Tuberculosis, an affliction that most commonly affects the lungs but also sometimes the kidneys, lymph nodes and bones, is the deadliest infectious disease in the world. In 2017, it killed 1.6 million people, according to figures from the World Health Organization (WHO).
This is why, at the end of September, the United Nations met in New York in order to raise 1.3 billion dollars in the hope of eradicating this disease by 2030 and making it easier to obtain medicines at lower cost. Because tuberculosis occurs mainly in environments where people suffer from malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding and a lack of medical follow-up, those affected generally live in very poor countries.
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