In 2010, three A few months before her seventh birthday, Ella Roberta suddenly fell ill with a chest infection and a severe cough. Her mother, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, took her to the local hospital in Lewisham, south-east London, where she was initially diagnosed with asthma.
In the following months, her condition worsened and she began to suffer from coughing syncopes – episodes of coughing so violent that they caused loss of consciousness due to a lack of blood flow to the brain. “She had one of the worst cases of asthma ever recorded,” Kissi-Debrah recalled. “They didn’t really know what was wrong because she didn’t look like regular asthmatics. They tested her for everything from epilepsy to cystic fibrosis. Her condition was extremely rare.” So uncommon that Kissi-Debrah has not found a single case in the scientific literature of a child suffering from cough syncope. “It only commonly occurred in long-distance truck drivers,” he says.
Over the next three years, Ella was hospitalized about 30 times. On February 15, 2013, shortly after her ninth birthday, she suffered a fatal asthma attack.
The original death certificate stated that she died of acute respiratory failure. “During the investigation, it was determined that this may have been partly due to ‘something in the air,’” says Kissi-Debrah. None of the doctors consulted mentioned the possibility that air pollution may have caused Ella to pale. This possibility only came to delicate after Kissi-Debrah was contacted by a local newspaper reader who read her story and suggested that she check air pollution levels on the day of Ella’s death. Indeed, on that day, nitrogen dioxide levels from traffic on the heavily congested South Circular Road, close to where they lived, far exceeded the limits.
With the aid of her lawyer, Kissi-Debrah asked the Supreme Court to overturn the judgment of the first inquest and request a second one, which was granted. “My lawyer Jocelyn charted all of Ella’s hospital admissions and then obtained data from monitors around the house,” Kissi-Debrah recalled. The pattern was clear: before Ella experienced coughing syncope, there had been a pointed boost in air pollution. “Twenty-seven out of 28 times. “I think it has scientific significance.” It further showed that, on average, carbon dioxide and particulate matter emissions in Lewisham are well above World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.
After nine days of deliberation, an investigation was held he stated that “Ella died of asthma caused by exposure to excessive air pollution.” He added: “Ella’s mother was not provided with information about the health risks of air pollution and its potential to worsen asthma. If she had received this information, she would have taken steps that could have prevented Ella’s death.” The cause of death on Ella’s death certificate has been changed. To this day, he remains the only person in the world whose death certificate includes air pollution.
“The coroner found that the other children were at risk of death,” Kissi-Debrah says. “He actually made it clear that if the air isn’t cleaned up, more children will die.”
Currently, 600,000 children die worldwide every year due to breathing polluted air. In London itself a a quarter of a million children suffer from asthma. “The only case in this country where no child died from asthma occurred during the first lockdown,” says Kissi-Debrah. Ten years after her daughter’s death, she continues to campaign for the right to pristine air. As part of her campaign, she is lobbying for the UK’s approval of the Pristine Air Act, also known as Ella’s Law: a parliamentary bill establishing the right to breathe pristine air.
“It is our right to breathe clean air and it is the Government’s responsibility to clean the air and ensure that the UK’s targets are in line with those of the WHO, although this is currently not the case,” he says. “This is not a party political issue. It’s about our health. This is about our future.”
The article was published in the July-August 2024 issue WIRED Magazine UK.