Severe Birth Defects Are Plaguing South Sudan’s Toxic Oil Fields

On a blistering June afternoon at the Koch County Hospital, a group of listless mothers, their babies in tow, lay sprawled on mats. One woman stared into space – a day earlier, she’d suffered a miscarriage in the second trimester. Another lay on her side cradling her belly in pain, afraid that she too could lose her baby.

Miscarriages and birth defects are commonplace at the dilapidated hospital in South Sudan’s oil patch, according to senior staffers, and locals blame the industry, whose towering smoke stacks and storage tanks loom in the distance – the only significant economic activity for ...