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A 9-year-old London girl who died after an asthma attack is thought to be the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death.
The landmark coroner’s ruling this week, updated from an earlier finding, was based on air-quality measurements from a busy road near Ella Kissi-Debrah’s Lewisham home, in southeast London.
Kissi-Debrah died in February 2013 after suffering cardiac arrest, the coroner reported on Wednesday, according to U.K.-based news agency PA Media. The girl suffered from severe asthma that caused episodes of cardiac and respiratory arrest, and had logged frequent hospital admissions over three years, the news report said.
Her medical cause of death was listed as acute respiratory failure, severe asthma and air pollution exposure. The ruling this week included more evidence that topped a previous inquest ruling from 2014, which concluded the girl died of acute respiratory failure.
“Air pollution was a significant contributory factor to both the induction and exacerbation of her asthma,” said assistant coroner Philip Barlow, PA Media reported.
“During the course of her illness between 2010 and 2013 she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines,” Barlow said.
“The principal source of her exposure was traffic emissions,” he said. Barlow said there was a failure in this period to reduce the level of nitrogen dioxide to within the limits set by EU and domestic law.
Ella’s mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, said she would prefer to see a public awareness campaign about the damage air pollution can do “rather than a blame game,” the report said.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan called it a “landmark moment” in a statement. “Today must be a turning point so that other families do not have to suffer the same heartbreak as Ella’s family,” he said.
In the U.S., the Trump administration earlier this month finalized a rule that could prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from strengthening measures to combat air pollution and the climate crisis in the future.
The new EPA rule is one of several moves that President Donald Trump’s political appointees are finalizing ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration next month, including a number that loosen existing environmental regulations. The new rule would require analyzing the cost and benefit of proposed policy changes under the decades-old Clean Air Act, regardless of whether the environmental impacts outweigh the potential economic ones. The Trump administration had largely cited cost to businesses and households as it engaged in the rollbacks.
Read: Veteran pollution regulator Michael Regan is Biden’s pick for EPA
The State of Global Air 2020 revealed that dirty air was responsible for 6.67 million deaths worldwide in 2019, and caused the premature death of nearly half a million babies, the first time the report focused on the youngest in the population.
Most of the deaths of this age group were in the developing world, data shows, and are part of an expanding body of research tying climate change and pollution to public health issues.
Read: Record emissions leave globe headed for 3-degree warming without a post-COVID ‘green recovery’
