New inquest will determine if illegal levels of air pollution played a role in Ella’s death eight years on, which could help save other children.
A fresh inquest commencing on Monday will investigate the death of an asthmatic nine-year-old schoolgirl following the release of a medical report indicating a direct link between her illness and poor air quality after her London home, adjacent to a busy road.
This ruling could make Ella Kissi-Debrah the first person in the UK, and possibly the world, to have air pollution identified as the cause of death.
Lawyers for the family presented new evidence directly linking her serious form of asthma and her death with the heavy traffic on London’s South Circular near her home in Lewisham, south-east London. They concluded that her death coincided with one of the worst air pollution surges in her local area.
The coroner for the inner south district of greater London will examine potential failings by government to take adequate action to reduce air pollution and, where possible, provide public information about the risks of poor air quality. In comes after minister have been reprimanded by judges multiple times for failing to bring road air quality within legal limits.
When Ella died in February 2013, the cause of death specified on her death certificate was ‘acute respiratory failure’. The inquest held in 2014 established that this could have been elicited by ‘something in the air’. In 2018, a new inquest was ordered after the family’s lawyers presented evidence to the attorney general from leading air pollution expert Prof Sir Stephen Holgate, WCRAQ Chair of Air Health.
Holgate directly correlated Ella’s hospital admissions with spikes in air pollution levels in her local area. He found that the serious respiratory episode that ended in her death on 15 February 2013 corresponded with one of the worst air pollution surges in her area.
The report concluded that the levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate pollution was primarily caused by diesel traffic and breached the legal limit of 40 µg/m3 in the South Circular during the three year period that Ella suffered from illness.
‘The dramatic worsening of her asthma in relation to air pollution episodes would go a long way to explain the timing of her exacerbations across her last four years. There is a real prospect that without unlawful levels of air pollution, Ella would not have died,’ Holgate’s report concluded.
‘It’s coming up to eight years since Ella passed and it has been a long, hard fight to get this inquest, with challenges along the way. What I want is justice for Ella, and for her to have on her death certificate the true cause of why she died,’ Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, Ella’s mother, spoke during the hearing.
Rosamund will have to recall in detail the suffering of her daughter over the difficult three year period, including the numerous resuscitations, the 30 ambulance journeys in five different hospitals across London, the four times of being hooked to a ventilator, and the induced coma.
