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| Thu, 17th Dec 2020 19:12:00 |
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The Guardian view on air pollution risks: make Ella’s experience count |
Air pollution in British cities must urgently be reduced. The public, and particularly people who have asthma – or other conditions that place them at increased risk from breathing particulate matter or gases including nitrogen dioxide – must be much better informed about the threat to their health. These are the only rational and humane conclusions to be drawn from dramatic events at a London coroner’s court this week, where it was recorded that exposure to air pollution was among the causes of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah’s death from asthma in February 2013 – a finding that has never before been recorded by a coroner with regard to the death of an individual.
The verdict is a victory for Ella’s mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, who, with the support of lawyers and medical reports, pushed hard for an earlier inquest verdict to be quashed. In the years leading up to her daughter’s death, Ms Kissi-Debrah lived with Ella and her siblings in Lewisham, within 30 metres of the South Circular road, where nitrogen dioxide emissions regularly exceeded national and EU legal limits. Ella was hospitalised 27 times in the three years before she died. Yet her mother was not warned by doctors, nor by any more general public health messaging, about the elevated risk to her asthmatic daughter from air pollution, the vast majority of it produced by traffic fumes.
Public understanding of the dangers has moved on as the issue of air pollution has risen up the political and environmental agenda; so have the government’s ambitions. In 2018 Michael Gove, who was then environment secretary, produced a clean air strategy that promised “comprehensive action”, after the government’s air pollution policy was ruled illegal for the third time, in a series of cases brought by the activist organisation ClientEarth.
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