Air pollution and climate change: It’s about your health!
Originally published in The Sudbury Star on Nov. 27, 2021
Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah was a precocious and talented young girl. At the age of nine, she could play the cornet, the drums, the guitar, and the piano. She loved to read, sing, and dance. From a young age, she excelled at numerous sports, and was in demand as a soccer player despite the chronic ill health that plagued her from age seven. Ella died at the ripe old age of nine, a victim of her final and fatal asthma attack.
Ella’s asthma tended to flare up during the winter. Over two years, fits of coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath took her to hospital 28 times.
Ella and her family lived a mere 25 metres from South Circular Road, one of London’s busiest thoroughfares. Due to the heavy traffic in Ella’s neighbourhood, levels of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) almost always exceeded the UK’s legal limits, especially during the winter. In the days before Ella’s death, pollution levels really spiked. Ella’s mother didn’t know any of this at the time.
Still, like many parents who lose a child, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah sought to make something good come out of her daughter’s passing. She started a charity to advocate for children with asthma. Someone suggested that air pollution might have been a factor in Ella’s illness. A human rights lawyer got involved, and a medical report was commissioned. The report demonstrated a clear association between Ella’s attacks of asthma and levels of air pollution in her neighbourhood. Ultimately, a second inquest was held, and on Dec. 16, 2020, Ella made posthumous history, becoming the first person in the UK (and possibly the world) to have air pollution officially listed on her death certificate as a cause of death. She is not, however, the first person to die a premature air pollution-related death.
It’s estimated that 40,000 deaths in the UK, and about 15,000 a year in Canada, can be attributed to air pollutants like NO2 and PM2.5. Very recent research concluded that in the year 2018, the PM2.5 generated just from burning fossil fuels was responsible for about 8 million premature deaths globally. As with the health impacts of climate change, the poor and people of colour everywhere bear much or the burden.
The battle for clean air was very evident at the recent COP26 meetings in Glasgow. There were the pediatric health professionals who cycled from London to Glasgow, bringing attention to the twin health threats of climate change and air pollution. Warrior Moms were there from Delhi, India, one of the most polluted cities in the world. (As I write this column, Delhi’s Air Quality Index is in the hazardous range.) Choked Up, a group of self-described “black and brown teenagers from South London,” were there, helping plan future international collaboration. And of course, Kissi-Debrah herself was there, ardent and eloquent as always, and concerned that many people feel like COP and climate change have nothing to do with them.
For Kissi-Debra, air pollution and climate change are not two separate issues. Both problems arise largely from our human fondness for burning things, especially fossil fuels. “This is a public health crisis,” she said. “Every time people mention climate change, they need to mention the health crisis . . . This is about you and your health.” Recent events in B.C. and elsewhere are starting to bring that lesson home to Canadians.
Sources:
Royal College of Physicians. 2016. “Every Breath We Take: the lifelong impact of air pollution.” This report can be downloaded at: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/every-breath-we-take-lifelong-impact-air-pollution
Vohra K et al. 2021. “Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion.” Envir Research 2021 Apr;195. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754
http://ellaroberta.org/ella-roberta-family-foundation/ Accessed Nov. 24, 2021.