a nine-year-old girl from south london
who died following an asthma attack in
2013
has become the first person in the uk to
have air pollution listed as a cause of
death
ella ado kisidebra lived near the south
circular road which is
one of london's busiest routes in the
three years before her death she'd
suffered multiple
seizures and was admitted to hospital on
27 occasions
today in a landmark ruling a second
inquest into her death found that air
pollution
made a material contribution to her
death
our environment correspondent claire
marshall has the story
ella was a healthy child before suddenly
starting to suffer asthma attacks so
severe she ended up on a ventilator
this cough an early sign of some of the
damage being done to her lungs we now
know without doubt
by air pollution
today's decision was the result her
mother has been campaigning for for
years
we've got the justice for her which is
so deserved
but also it's about other children still
as we walk around
our city of high levels of air pollution
ella's family home was beside london's
busy south circular road
she would walk to school along it at the
time no connection was made between
ella's fatal asthma attack and air
pollution
then new medical evidence emerged i
wanted the real reason
why she went through what she went
through i hope through this her legacy
um maybe a new clean air act i think the
only bit i got a little bit angry was
in court when it turned out that lots of
people knew about it
and yet the response has been so slow
the original inquest was quashed and
today the coroner ruled that levels of
toxic gases and pollutants and exhausts
were way above safe levels set by the
world health organization
and without doubt they contributed to
her death she was drowning in her
secretions
each time she had one of these dreadful
attacks and the fact that they clustered
together
and that these were in the winter and
autumn months when the air pollution was
worse in london putting all that
together
it suddenly started to make sense
this isn't just about london this is
about the whole of the uk
one expert witness said that the
children breathing in these fumes should
be treated as seriously
as if they're breathing in second-hand
slope perhaps parents should be advised
to take a different route to school
the experts are now calling for lessons
to be learned from ella's death
it will mean that we can protect
children's health going forward
and what we do need to do is develop the
education and the tools needed
to talk about air pollution and
hopefully the government
will take air pollution reduction as a
national priority
she she would be very proud that her her
name is being used
to do something really positive because
i've always said to you she was
incredibly kind
so this is the sort of thing she would
approve of
the government says it's spending almost
four billion pounds on tackling air
pollution
and it's setting new ambitious targets
but this is no longer about anonymous
statistics
it's about the life terrible suffering
and death of a child who was breathing
poisonous air
claire marshall bbc news