First cause of death attributed to air pollution in the UK, coroner rules in landmark Kissi-Debrah inquest

Ella Kissi-Debrah’s death in 2013 was found to have been caused by severe asthma, acute respiratory failure, and air pollution exposure.

Legal history has been made as it was ruled that air pollution was a cause of the death of nine-year-old schoolgirl, Ella Kissi-Debrah. This landmark case has recorded exposure to air pollution as a medical cause of death.

The two-week inquest at Southwark Coroner’s Court concluded that unsafe levels of air pollution ‘made a material contribution’ to the death of Kissi-Debrah in Lewisham, eight years on.

‘I will conclude that Ella died of asthma, contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution’, assistant coroner Philip Barlow said in the detailed conclusion of the inquest.

WCRAQ Chair of Air Health and professor of immunopharmacology at the University of Southampton, Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, told the inquest that between Ella’s ‘exceptionally rare’ condition and the surrounding of the South Circular put her in ‘exquisite’ risk. He warned that Ella Kissi-Debrah was like ‘a canary in a coalmine, signally the risk of air pollution to other Londoners’.

Holgate specified in his 2018 report that a Catford monitoring station a mile away from her home ‘consistently’ exceeded legal EU limits across the three years before her death.

He was ‘almost certain’ that Kissi-Debrah’s asthma condition would have been ‘substantially less severe’ if the concentration of her London home has been within safe air quality limits.

Ella Kissi-Debrah suffered multiple seizures and was hospitalised 30 times in the three years before her death.

Ella’s mother, Rosamund, and two siblings attended the ruling. The original inquest ruling from 2014 found she died of acute respiratory failure, which Holgate contributed significant evidence against.

Coroner Philip Barlow additionally concluded: ‘There was also a lack of information given to Ella’s mother that possibly contributed to her death.’