The First Person In the UK To Have Air Pollution Listed As a Cause of Death (bbc.com) 79
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A nine-year-old girl who died following an asthma attack has become the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as a cause of death. Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who lived near the South Circular Road in Lewisham, south-east London, died in 2013. Southwark Coroner's Court found that air pollution "made a material contribution" to Ella's death. Prof Gavin Shaddick, a government adviser on air pollution, called it "a landmark decision."
At the conclusion of the two-week inquest, coroner Philip Barlow said Ella had been exposed to "excessive" levels of pollution. The inquest heard that in the three years before her death, she had multiple seizures and was admitted to hospital 27 times. Delivering a narrative verdict, Mr Barlow said levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) near Ella's home exceeded World Health Organization and European Union guidelines. He added: "There was a recognized failure to reduce the levels of nitrogen dioxide, which possibly contributed to her death. There was also a lack of information given to Ella's mother that possibly contributed to her death." Giving his conclusion over almost an hour, the coroner said: "I will conclude that Ella died of asthma, contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution."
At the conclusion of the two-week inquest, coroner Philip Barlow said Ella had been exposed to "excessive" levels of pollution. The inquest heard that in the three years before her death, she had multiple seizures and was admitted to hospital 27 times. Delivering a narrative verdict, Mr Barlow said levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) near Ella's home exceeded World Health Organization and European Union guidelines. He added: "There was a recognized failure to reduce the levels of nitrogen dioxide, which possibly contributed to her death. There was also a lack of information given to Ella's mother that possibly contributed to her death." Giving his conclusion over almost an hour, the coroner said: "I will conclude that Ella died of asthma, contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution."
First Ever (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd have thought the first would've been during the Victorian-era of heavy coal burning pollution.
Re:First Ever (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean when London was universally blackened by coal soot and you could die walking around in the prevailing stagnant 'air'?
Paradise is impossible for humanity. All we do when we get there is pick at scabs.
Re: First Ever (Score:2, Troll)
Of courae paradise is possible.
You fuckers just fight it every step of the way, by declaring it could bnt possibly be thst you aren't abused and ripped of and lied to daily.
Why are you such a bunch of collaborating-through-inaction limp dicks?
Don't call me unrealistix when you are the only reason it is unrealistic! What's not possible in your heads is what ruins it for all of us!
Re: First Ever (Score:2)
Case in point: Shitty fuckin touch screen keyboards being banned as a capital crime and replaced by real physical keyboards like the Nokia N9something series, starting tomorrow!
Then my comment would not look like shit without fixing half the damn inputs, and fixing half the damn fixings, and fixing half the damn fixing fixings, and cancer like autocorrect would not be neede to avoid that... well, not avoid but switch from a character level to a word level but staying just as shitty.
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The problem is, nobody can agree on what Paradise would look like.
My personal idea would be some sort of Fully Automated spacebound communism. Nobody has to work, cos the machines do it all, so we can spend our time on interesting shit instead. Like going to space, or playing guitar all day or whatever.
Other people might consider that nightmarish, and instead envision some sort of libertarian rugged individualist bullshit as their idea.
And some people might like a goose stepping fascist power-state with an
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I'd have thought the first would've been during the Victorian-era of heavy coal burning pollution.
But they probably wouldn't list "air pollution" a a cause of death back then. Which is TFA's title...
They probably would have listed the acute disease (e.g. bornchitis).
Quite remarkable.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Quite remarkable.... (Score:2)
Kill the Reddit spy!
...and quite wrong (Score:2)
the coroner said: "I will conclude that Ella died of asthma, contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution."
So what he actually said was that she died of asthma and that air pollution was a contributing factor in that death. That is not at all the same as saying that air pollution was the cause of death. It's very hard to believe that the 4,000 smog deaths from 1952 don't contain a cause of death that is at least as closely linked to air pollution.
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Officially the cause of death on the death certificate was "1a) respiratory arrest 1b) asthma 1c) air pollution" so yes the COD was officially (partly) air pollution. The implication is that her ashthma would have been survivable if not for the air pollution.
It's very hard to believe that the 4,000 smog deaths from 1952 don't contain a cause of death that is at least as closely linked to air pollution.
While the coroners at the time probably thought it reporting was not the same at the time and probably didn't allow for recording multiple factors.
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Also, did it really take 7 years for the findings to be concluded?
I feel bad for the family: original horrible loss, compounded by a laggardly investigation.
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Re: This is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical Americans. The reason you keep being raped and abused by corporations is because they trained you to blame EVERYTHING only on yourselves.
And to see yoirselves as moochers for not letting them leech on you and as thieves for not letting them steal from you.
May I suggest changing that attitude first, and go to school, and have a class on cause and effect and causal chains/trees/graphs?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Whereas you seem to be one of the typical whiners who blame all of your ills on someone else.
There's plenty of responsibility to be taken, both by corporations, and people. There's a lot of middle ground that gets ignored.
Then again, for someone who apparently believes all 300 million Americans have a common stereotype, that's not not unexpected.
May I suggest taking a chisel to your brain, and opening it up to new ideas occasionally?
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Not everyone gets to have much say on where they wind up living.
You mean prisoners and children. Adults have the freedom to live anywhere they want, meaning any city, suburbs or small villages on the countryside if you want.
The UK has social housing and housing benefits that allow one to live basically anywhere. You don't have to stay in one street, but you are free to move. And when you have a child with asthma so bad that it counts as disabled (which was the case here) then social services would have jumped at the chance to help you to get out of there.
Either somethin
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Not really. A poor person cannot afford to live in a wealthy neighborhood [washingtonpost.com] that prohibits apartment buildings in order to keep the poor out.
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Not really. A poor person cannot afford to live in a wealthy neighborhood [washingtonpost.com] that prohibits apartment buildings in order to keep the poor out.
Nor can you live on the motorway, under a bridge or just any green field or acre you see. You didn't really think I meant literally anywhere, do you? We certainly have restrictions. Still, this is the UK. I don't know why you link to the Washington Post. Here in the UK do we have free housing for poor people, and this means you literally get to live for free and there are no "dedicated slums" or whatever. You can just pick any private landlord as long as the rent is low. This certainly won't get you a room
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Who care's if it's a poor neighborhood if the streets are clean, crime is low, and there's work that pays the bills?
Why is there this need to bring poor people into wealthy neighborhoods? Shouldn't we instead try to bring wealth into poor neighborhoods?
I grew up in a pretty poor little town. It's now a pretty wealthy little town. People worked to bring jobs to the town. People worked to educate themselves. People worked to make it a nicer place. If more people took the time to invest in themselves and
Re:Butt farts (Score:5, Informative)
Better yet, let's stop transferring wealth out of poor neighborhoods [strongtowns.org]!
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Better yet, let's stop transferring wealth out of poor neighborhoods [strongtowns.org]!
That was an interesting read.
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The UK has social housing and housing benefits that allow one to live basically anywhere. You don't have to stay in one street, but you are free to move.
Good heavens. You mean I can live in that lovely little vintage cottage over on Castle Hill in Windsor?
No, of course not, you can't be that thick. While it wasn't an issue for this particular tragedy, right now, half the country can't even walk down to the pub, so saying you can move anywhere you want is a bit... rich.
Also, and I admit, this is entirely apocryphal, from what I've read, the social services in the UK are more likely to move the child, and leave the parents, after placing all the blame for t
Re: Butt farts (Score:2)
Not everyone is constantly looking through every of the infinite ever-growing cons in which coprorations deliberately skew your perception to steal even more from you, or has the power, or even the choice.
If I put a glass of poison in front of you, that "some people say is quite unhealthy to you, but our TV expert doctors here, Ronald, Sanders and King, say are totally fine and the constant consiracy theorist nutters are to be lauged at in their yoghurt-scented yurts", and tell you my poison is sooo delicio
Re: This is BS (Score:2)
*Looks at above comment*
[Ancient aliens guy meme]
"Americans..."
Not the first person... (Score:3)
but the first person listed. In the past air has been worse in the UK due to coal. Naturally, this means some poor individual likely died in a similar fashion.
Frankly, this all seems rather symbolic and not really something of substance.
Re:Not the first person... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a start, it creates potential for liability, which I'm turn creates a reason for local government to invest in cleaner air.
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It's a start, it creates potential for liability, which I'm turn creates a reason for local government to invest in cleaner air.
They've started but are facing very stiff resistance from the car lobby. They've started with low traffic neighbourhoods around here and oh my god the car lobby. They always like to say how much more dangerous it is for cyclists (it isn't) and how much worse for old people (actually car ownership drops quite steeply with age). But what it really comes down to is that piling into th
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Precisely, it's symbolic. It symbolizes that we have things so good in the Western world that we get upset when a child dies of so called "air pollution" in a nation with some of the cleanest air in the world.
Let's look how other nations rank on air quality, shall we?
https://ourworldindata.org/air... [ourworldindata.org]
https://www.iqair.com/world-ai... [iqair.com]
It's a terrible tragedy that a young child died from what appears to be a quite treatable condition given modern medicine in a nation as free and wealthy as the UK. What this s
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It's a terrible tragedy that a young child died from what appears to be a quite treatable condition given modern medicine in a nation as free and wealthy as the UK.
Not going to justify this, but asthma is not necessarily a treatable condition, more manageable in some cases.
Anyway:
For this to be news means that we solved so many other greater threats to our health, safety, and freedom that we have the time to worry about slightly elevated NOx levels in some tiny little corner of the UK.
Not sure if London qua
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Re:thanks Boomers (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can thank the boomers for the effort to make the air cleaner than it was 70 years ago.
Except boomers didn't make the air cleaner. Boomers made their air cleaner. They achieved this primarily by exporting their contamination to various parts of Asia.
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> They achieved this primarily by exporting their contamination to various parts of Asia.
He's right. Blame this on the Asians. lol
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Keep in mind as well that air pollution of this kind (particulates and NOx) is very much a local problem. The factory in the next town over isn't going to affect you much and moving it to China hasn't ma
Re: thanks Boomers (Score:2)
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> first generation since industrialization where you are not entitled to a job for life; or a home; or three square meals per day.
What? Which previous generation was ever *entitled* to any of this?
Re: thanks Boomers (Score:2)
Cause, or contributing cause? (Score:3)
the coroner said: "I will conclude that Ella died of asthma, contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution."
So, was it the primary cause, or just a contributing cause only? Shouldn't s/he have said " triggered by exposure to excessive air pollution"?
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Has anyone ever died prematurely and had the cause officially attributed to "Bad Parents?"
I suspect we could make a lot more sense of our world if we had the collective temerity to commit that bit of candor.
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I suspect this is a case of "passive parents". Nobody really wants to blame the mother at this point. After all it's her child that had died. Nobody else got blamed for it either, so the blame now officially falls onto the air pollution.
Frankly, here in the UK do we expect people to be active. A bus driver won't stop if you don't signal them and a doctor won't bother you with countless questions about your private life and living conditions when you don't come forward on your own. Healthcare is free here in
Not only that (Score:3)
Lots of insurance people will get heart attacks.
Give me a break (Score:2)
So, just how bad is the air in the UK? I'm quite certain the air quality there is far better than a great many other nations. That's not saying that they can't improve, only that there's far worse places to look before making a big deal out of UK air pollution. While we're at it let's investigate Israel for more human right's abuses while it's neighbors hang gay men from cranes.
I thought the UK was supposed to have this great national healthcare system. They couldn't find an oxygen generator from this p
Re:Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
"So, just how bad is the air in the UK?"
This little girl lived in London. The air in any large city is often rather polluted. Funnily enough the river Thames is now a poster child of cleanliness, given the sewer it once was. The city does have a sort of a plan to improve air quality. London Plane trees are apparently the best tree to combat pollution and London is also able to describe itself as a forest or some similar nonsense.
Mix nine million people and the ICE into a small area and you get rubbish air quality.
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Mix nine million people and the ICE into a small area and you get rubbish air quality.
With 40 years of people seeking cleaner burning cars, greater fuel efficiency, and from that coming catalytic converters, fuel injection, low sulfur fuels, electronic emission controls, unleaded gasoline (which really means we stopped putting lead in the gasoline), and on and on I have to wonder just how much the internal combustion engine adds to air pollution in any Western city today.
My guess the bigger problem is construction, heating, industry, and things blowing in from outside the city. Farming, wil
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Your guess that 'the air out of a tailpipe is cleaner than the air that went in' means that the car would periodically need to empty a tank containing everything it had filtered from the air. That doesn't happen, so I think you need to rethink the physics of that.
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There are filters for the air that enters the car engine and cabin. These filters are cleaned or replaced with every oil change. Or at least they should. On large vehicles this happens with every stop for fuel. Much of what escapes the engine fliters are consumed n the piston chamber, If something still remain then it is consumed further by the heat of the catalytic converter. If it were some insect or leaf fragment then its consumed as gasses.
I change my filters as needed, if you do no then you are pa
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Funnily enough the river Thames is now a poster child of cleanliness,
Was. Not any more. The genius government a while back decided that Private Companies would do a better job because Private Companies are obviously better because Companies. Except the sewage dumping fines are less than the cost of building proper facilities.
The city does have a sort of a plan to improve air quality.
Ish? I mean yes, but while Khan is good on social issues he's not so good at environmental ones (even though they're closely
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Why would you stay? (Score:1)
First of all, it's absolutely right to blame pollution and to blame the government for not protecting its citizen.
But ... a parent should not trust blindly for everyone to know what's right and wrong. Why did she not move away while the girl was still alive?
This should have been one of the first instincts by the mother. Instead she claims not to have known about the air pollution, which I find very hard to believe. I'm fairly certain anyone living in an area where the levels are so high that these have to b
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When no one is to blame, everyone is to blame (Score:3)
why is it a "questionable honour"?
It's a first, but a sad one. I suggest you read the other reports on it as well. Over a period of three years did the child pass out many times, the ambulance had to come 30(!) times, and the child was then categorised as disabled. And in all this time and all these severe and alarming signs did nobody bother to check for the cause of it, but left it all to the mother. In the end does the blame then fall on the pollution. This exactly what it means when we say: when no one is to blame, everyone is to blame.
Realy the first? (Score:2)
What about that time 1-2 centuries ago, when the entire UK heated with coal and the city was one big coal smok cloud, and it was the most common cause of death?
Are you seriously trying to tell me they never listed coal lung or something as the cause of death? Or that you wanna cheat by declaring that it was not the exact same combination of letters as yours?
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Whethe it was number one in fact or not, coal pollution wasn't the cause of death according to records. If you look in 19th century death records you'll see top 10 causes of death as other stuff, search "leeds top ten ways to die in victorian britain"
And note not until 1874 did death certificate with doctor listing cause of death required. Before that your spouse or child or other relative would say, "well e ad consummption" or " poor sod ad ter'ble diarrhea" and there you go, cause of death.
Autopsies 20
The Fog (Score:1)