Rosamund Kissi-Debrah believes poor air quality in London contributed to her daughter’s death

[Blue Bianchi 77]

The statistic that at least 40,000 premature deaths a year are caused by toxic levels of air pollution in the UK is often repeated, yet it can be hard to visualise the devastating human impact of the failure to take decisive action to clean our air.

 

New evidence released this week, however, has changed that. In an expert report for Ella’s family, her serious form of asthma and her death in February 2013 are linked directly to the illegal levels of pollution from diesel traffic thundering daily down London’s South Circular Road near her home.

Her family are now fighting for a new inquest to cite air pollution as a cause of her death in what would be a legal first that could pile pressure on the government to take decisive action.

 

They allege the government’s repeated failure to reduce air pollution breached Ella’s right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

 

For Rosamund, a former teacher, the knowledge that a leading expert who has examined the postmortem material believes air pollution caused her daughter’s severe asthma, and was a causative factor in her death, has been hard to take in.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/07/in-the-days-around-ellas-death-there-were-big-spikes-in-air-pollution

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-pollution-diabetes/air-pollution-may-account-for-1-in-7-new-diabetes-cases-idUSKBN1JV25W