AS ALL mothers do, Sue Green remembers vividly the moment that her first baby was born, but not for the usual reasons. “The midwife was smiling, then her face fell,” recalls Sue. “ ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘It’s a . . . ’ And then there was silence.”

The silence continued for some time. Doctors looked at the child. So did nurses. And, over the next few hours, medical students. But none of them said anything. With mounting anxiety, the exhausted mother asked what was wrong. “You’re not telling me something!” she remembers screaming. “Is it a boy or a girl?” But they couldn’t tell her.

Sue and her husband John had just become parents to a beautiful child that looked like a boy, but his sexual organs were terribly deformed.The baby had been born with a condition called hypospadias, a malformation whereby the opening in the penis through which urine is passed is in the wrong place. In mild cases it is slightly off centre, but in more severe cases it might be at the base of the penis or even beneath the scrotum.

In the case of their son, Mark, they couldn’t find an opening at all. Nor could they identify a penis; it was somehow fused to a tiny scrotum. In fact, it took four weeks of chromosome tests to establish that the baby was a boy.

This augured years of difficult times and painful surgery ahead. Taken as part of a bigger picture, cases such as Mark’s — corrected after six operations over three years — are raising the alarm among medical scientists across the industrialised world, because what happened to him is happening more often to newborn babies in families with no history of the condition. It is part of a growing incidence of genital deformities, poor fertility rates and an explosion in testicular cancers that, together, are screaming out that something is wrong.

As yet, no one can say for sure what causes the problems. However, there are suspicions about chemicals in the environment — compounds that have the potential to upset the delicate balance of hormones in the body. Prosaically called “endocrine disrupters”, they touch on every aspect of our lives. They are found in the plastics, carpets and fabrics all around you. Tiny amounts are found in your milk, vegetables and in some packaging surrounding your food. They are in your make-up, perfumes, face creams and the sun lotions that protect your skin. They are in the pesticides that allow your food to grow — and even in the coatings of slow-release medicines. In fact, there is nothing that you can do to avoid them.

In May, more than 120 scientists from around the world met in Prague and issued a declaration to Western governments giving warning that reproductive problems were increasing in developed nations, and calling for more research into what was causing them.

The declaration made two points clear: first, that “there is serious concern about the high prevalence of reproductive disorders in European boys and young men”, and, secondly, that endocrine disrupters may be one of the factors responsible. Last month, scientists found the first evidence — which is hotly disputed — that they could be right.

When Mark Green was born in 1995, his mother had never heard of hypospadias; neither had many of the medical staff at Antrim Hospital in Northern Ireland where he was delivered. “They were obviously very concerned because they couldn’t find a hole through which Mark could pass water,” recalls Sue, 34, a care worker. “They rushed him to Royal Victoria Hospital for Sick Children in Belfast — still without telling me what was wrong — where a specialist found an opening in his scrotum. Eventually, they told my husband that Mark had hypospadias, but we couldn’t find any information about it anywhere.

“I was devastated and deeply worried. Everyone wants their baby to be perfect, but this was something that we’d never heard of. And more than anything, it was something that we felt we couldn’t talk about. Outside my immediate family, there was no one to share our worries.”

Over a period of three years, Mark underwent six operations to separate his penis from the scrotum, to construct a urinary tract and to enable him to urinate normally. He is now 10 and his parents are still waiting to find out whether his sexual organs will function properly in puberty. It is a source of enormous concern for them.

Even worse, until four years ago, Sue was wrongly blaming herself for his condition. She had been suffering from an illness of her own and had been taking medication to alleviate the symptoms.

“I thought that the medication had caused Mark’s problems,” she says. “I felt terribly guilty that that had affected him somehow. I thought that it was my fault. It wasn’t until we were referred to a geneticist that I was assured that wasn’t the case.”