A group of teenagers are using Ella’s death to campaign against the toxic fumes that helped to kill her.
Ella Kissi-Debrah died aged nine in 2013. Last month, the Southwark Coroner’s Court inquest attributed air pollution as a factor in her cause of death.
Lewisham schoolgirl who had asthma lived 25 metres from the South Circular Road. She suffered from multiple seizures and was admitted to hospital 27 times in the three years before her death.
WCRAQ Chair of Air Health, Professor Sir Stephen Holgate of the University of Southampton, studied data collected from a nearby Catford air monitor and saw that the times Ella was admitted to hospital, were times when air quality was poorest.
Today, Ella would have been 17 years old. Her friends are campaigning against the polluted air that led to her death.
‘Choked Up’ is an organisation that describe themselves as ‘a group brown and black teenagers who want to right to breathe clean air to be made law’.
Founders Anjali Raman-Middleton, Destiny Boka-Batesa, Kaydine Rogers, and Nyeleti Brauer-Maxaeia, all met on a training course with the Advocacy Academy, a charity that encourages young people to tackle social issues in their communities.
Destiny Boka Batesa lives with her family in South London. She stated: ‘If I could, I wouldn’t live where I am now.’
Destiny has younger sister suffers from asthma, as Ella did.
‘The attacks come at you fast and in really unprovoked situations. You do not know whether to just break down because you are supposed to be the stronger sibling,’ Destiny described. ‘Seeing her struggle to breathe, you could actually hear it, the whistling that came out of her breathing.’
Destiny explained that it was a sense of helplessness that led her to being a founding member of this campaign.
‘When you finally talk about all the factors that surround air pollution, you realise that there are 101 measures that could have been implemented to save Ella and all the other Ella’s who live in the UK,’ Destiny said.
Choked Up is calling on Government to enshrine the right to breathe clean air in law. They cite the current Clean Air Act of 1993 as out of date. The group’s long-term goal is to secure a new Clean Air Act that follows the World Health Organisation’s air quality targets.
Anjali Raman Middleton grew up with Ella in the same neighbourhood and both attended the same primary school, where the dangers of air pollution were largely unknown.
‘I knew she had asthma, but at that age, it was just a pump. It was nothing that meant you would die,’ Anjali commented. ‘People would live by really busy roads like south circular and never think twice about the air they were breathing. It was the backdrop to real life.’
Since Ella’s death, Anjali has been determined to improve the lives of people of colour, who she recognises ‘are more likely to live in polluted areas.’
She pinpointed her relationship with Ella’s mother, Rosamund, as helping her ‘learn about air pollution and the inequality surrounding it.’
Anjali calls for ‘the Government to acknowledge that deaths and ill health has been caused by air pollution.’
