Cancer has struck nearly every household in Wewelsfleth, a village of 1,500 inhabitants in northwest Germany near the mouth of the Elbe River. Residents feel not only cursed, but also abandoned by authorities in their search for an elusive answer.

We won't give up, says Ingo Karstens, trying to sound like he's ready for a fight. Still, his words seem more helpless than anything. Sometimes he feels "like Don Quixote," he says, his shoulders drooping a little. It almost seems as if he were worried that fighting would be futile.

A map is lying on Karstens' table. It depicts the Wilstermarsch, a completely flat, barren stretch of land on the north bank of the Elbe River, in northwestern Germany. On it, you can also see the 14 municipalities that make up the district, including Wewelsfleth, of which Karstens is the mayor.

Jorg Müller / Agentur Focus
The northwestern German village of Wewelsfleth feels
inexplicably cursed by cancer.

The color scale on the map ranges from dark gray to dark red. Gray signifies that everything is alright, while red means that something is wrong. The large, orange area on the eastern end of the Wilstermarsch is Wewelsfleth. The map illustrates the incidence of cancer in the region. People living in Wewelsfleth are 50 percent more likely to have cancer than people in other communities in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Between 1998 and 2008, some 142 new cases were reported in Wewelsfleth, as compared with the 95 cases that would have been expected based on state averages. This is what statisticians call "significant".