A candlelit vigil will mark what would have been the 18th birthday of the London girl whose death was caused by pollution as her mother called for more action to clean up the city’s air.
Ellaa Adoo Kissi-Debrah, who lived near the South Circular road, died aged nine in February 2013 after a severe asthma attack caused a fatal cardiac arrest.
A coroner’s report listed “air pollution exposure” as one of the causes of her death following prolonged exposure to levels of levels of harmful nitrogen dioxide and particulates well above World Heath Organisation (WHO) guidelines.
More than 100 Londoners are expected to gather on Sunday afternoon – the eve of what would have been Ella’s coming of age – at the bandstand in Mountsfield Park in Lewisham where she liked to play and cycled to school.
Ella’s mother Rosamund Adoo Kissi-Debra said: “It’s going to be emotional for me. A lot of her old classmates will be there and she would have been going to university just like they are.
“When your child dies a part of your future goes as well. She had so much potential and I’m not going to be able to see it. These milestones are particularly hard.
“But I’m sure Ella would see it as an honour that so many people are campaigning on her behalf and in her memory.”
The vigil is due to start at 3.30pm and last for about 45 minutes. As well as friends it will be attended by the priest who gave Ella the last rites, choirs and representatives of charities and environmental groups. The vigil is open to all.
It comes just over a week after the most severe pollution episode since 2018 enveloped much of London in “very high” levels of smog.
Slack winds and heavy traffic that has almost returned to volumes seen before the pandemic were both blamed for the dirty air alert.
Mrs Adoo Kissi-Debrah, who is now a campaigner for cleaner air, said she hoped the remembrance of her daughter’s death would “bring about real change and make the Government adopt in full the WHO guidelines on pollution.
“Last Friday was terrible, people contacted me and said ‘oh my God I can smell it, now I know what you’re talking about.’ My view is that if you smell it and taste it you know the pollution is there.”
Mayor Sadiq Khan warned London faced a crisis of “filthy air and gridlocked roads”.
Last September WHO tightened its air quality guideline limits for six pollutants because of the growing body of evidence about their threat to health.
A report from George Washington University earlier this month concluded air pollution is likely to have contributed to the deaths of more than 1.8 million people around the world in 2019.
Tiny particles known as PM2.5 are thought to lead to conditions such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease and lung cancer.
