In memory of Cerys
A MOTHER who lost her daughter to cot death is organising a music event to raise money for other families affected.
Greenwich resident Shaleen Campbell also hopes the show will be a spiritual affair to remember her daughter Cerys River Ayton, who died last year.
Cerys River was just two months old when she died on November 10.
Shaleen, 27, said: “The two months I had her was the best time in my life.
“She was a good baby and she was really loved by the huge families of both me and my partner.
“I’ve got 301 photos of her so that’s very important to me.”
A student at Greenwich University with a background in staging events, Shaleen decided to use her skils to hatch a plan to help others hit by cot death.
She wants to organise the musical event in November that would raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID).
With the event expected to cost £5,000, Shaleen is hoping companies at the Wharf can pitch in for sponsorship or offer her a venue, which she expects to take up the bulk of the cost.
Shaleen said: “My key objective is to have a memorial for Cerys River but also to help the charities.
“Great Ormond Street carried out the autopsy on Cerys and FSID provided the counselling.
“It would be great to help them out.”
Shaleen has already begun fundraising herself and later this month will be taking to the skies.
Despite being afraid of heights Shaleen will be taking part in a sponsored sky dive at Maidstone on August 24.
She said: “I’m absolutely terrified of doing the sky dive but I'm confident I can overcome my fear.”
- Anyone wishing to contribute can visit www.myspace.com/thecerysriverlounge, email cerysriverlounge@yahoo.co.uk or call 07951 263997.
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I was very sorry to read about baby Cerys, and I've some understanding of the grief of losing a child as our only daughter died at 14 weeks in 1985.
I attended Thames Polytechnic, which later became University of Greenwich, but I left in 1972 and moved away from London. In my final year, I learned about how Dr John Snow used the locations of cholera deaths to correctly deduce that contaminated water must be the means of transmission of cholera.
Before that, I attended St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath, and our cross-country runs often took us to Wolfe's statue in Greenwich Park, or down to the Cutty Sark.
I'm now retired and have been using Office for National Statistics to check the very wide variations in the rates of infant deaths in different electoral wards. In London, there are 625 electoral wards if City of London is counted as one ward, and twenty-three of those wards had zero infant deaths in the five-year period 2002-2006 and when you see where these wards are in relation to the incinerators in London, you'll wonder why nobody has done this research before me.
If Ms Cambell contacts Julia Lewis at the South London Press, she'll be able to get access to articles about my research.
More information at www.ukhr.org
We also lost our second son who died of leukaemia, aged 19 years. The Daily Express of 25 January 2005 had an article about him, and a picture of the nearby Shrewsbury hospital incinerator where clinical & radioactive waste was burned.
Kind regards,
Michael Ryan,
Shrewsbury
When I wrote the above blog comment two months ago, I didn't know that two studies of infant mortality rates around incinerators were carried out in Japan (2004) and Italy (2007).
These are the references:
J Epidemiol. 2004 May;14(3):83-93.
Risk of adverse reproductive outcomes associated with proximity to municipal solid waste incinerators with high dioxin emission levels in Japan.
Tango T, Fujita T, Tanihata T, Minowa M, Doi Y, Kato N, Kunikane S, Uchiyama I, Tanaka M, Uehata T.
Department of Technology Assessment and Biostatistics, National Institute of Public Health, Wako, Saitama, Japan
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Epidemiology:Volume 18(5) SupplSeptember 2007p S125
Infant Mortality in 27 Italian Municipalities With Solid Waste Incinerators (1981-2001)
[ISEE 2007 CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS SUPPLEMENT: Abstracts]
Bianchi, F; Minichilli, F; Pierini, A; Linzalone, N; Rial, M
CNR National Research Council, Institute of Clinical Physiology, Epidemiology Unit, Pisa, Italy.
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Here's a ward map showing high infant death rates around the Bernard Road incinerator in Sheffield:
http://www.ukhr.org/incineration/sheffieldincinerator.pdf
Kind regards,
Michael Ryan,
Shrewsbury