British justice recognized for the first time on Wednesday the role of air pollution in one death, that of a nine-year-old girl who lived near a busy road and died in 2013 in London.
“My conclusion is that air pollution contributed materially to Ella’s death,” Adoo-Kissi-Debrah announced London’s Southwark District Deputy Coroner Philip Barlow after two weeks of hearings in this case.
The little girl died on February 15, 2013 of a severe asthma attack after almost three years of repeated attacks and more than 30 hospitalizations related to the disease.
She lived with her family less than 100 feet from the South Circular, a busy and regularly congested road in South London.
An initial investigation in 2014 determined that he died of acute respiratory failure caused by severe asthma.
But in 2018, Professor Stephen Holgate, a British air pollution expert, pointed out an “obvious link” between the girl’s admissions to the ER and recorded spikes in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter, the most common pollutants. harmful.
At the start of this second judicial investigation at the end of November, the family’s lawyer, Richard Hermer, had accused the local authorities of having been slow to take action against the sharp increase in air pollution in the area.
pau-acc / d
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