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Ella’s mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, a former teacher, spent years fighting to have her daughter’s death examined by a second coroner. Her resilience was repaid on Wednesday when Barlow agreed with expert medical evidence provided by the family which said Ella’s particular form of acute asthma was exacerbated by air pollution.
Kissi-Debrah’s lawyers submitted that air pollution was a public health emergency and there was a pressing need for it to be recorded as a cause of death to ensure public health programmes to tackle toxic air were prioritised.
In evidence to the two-week inquest, Prof Stephen Holgate, an immunopharmacologist and consultant respiratory physician of the University of Southampton and Southampton general hospital, said a biological cause of Ella’s disease getting worse in the winter months was the seasonal worsening air pollution.
He said it was the cumulative effect of the toxic air Ella was breathing in living within 30 metres of the South Circular road that caused her final acute asthma attack.
Holgate said Ella was like a canary in a coalmine, signalling the risk to other Londoners from the toxic mix of pollutants such as nitrogen oxides in the air.
Ella had had numerous seizures and been taken to hospital almost 30 times in the three years before her death.
An inquest ruling from 2014, which found that she died of acute respiratory failure, was quashed by the high court following new evidence about the dangerous levels of air pollution close to her home.
During the hearing, Holgate, who was a member of the royal commission for environmental pollution until it was closed in 2011, heavily criticised the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Health and Social Care for failing to work together on toxic air.
A family photo of Ella Kissi-Debrah, front. Photograph: Claire Cox/PA
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