Professor Stephen Holgate

I happened to pick up the evening standard and I saw Rosamund Kissy Deborah.

I mean, it was just a dreadfully sad story.

I mean, I'm a doctor, you know, and there was clearly an opportunity to try and unravel what had happened.

And I know Rosalind couldn't do that, and none of the doctors in all these hospitals could do it either.

But because I had spent my life researching asthma, I knew a lot about the disease.

Mounds and mounds and boxes of hospital notes and GP records and all the rest.

And what I saw in the sections was almost unbelievable, really.

It's as if you'd lost your skin and had kind of raw areas underneath.

This lining in large areas had peeled off and was rolled up into the airway itself.

It was coming away and was rolling up with mucus, very sticky, viscid mucus.

So she had these large plugs of mucus that blocked her airways.

We were, I suppose, I hate to use the term fortunate, Wendy, but I mean, in a way it was.

It just so happened that there was a monitoring station for air pollution one mile from Ella's house.

We could see the local air pollution levels were astronomically high.

Illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide.

We know that these pollutants can penetrate the lung and pass through into the bloodstream and circulate to all parts of the body now.

Yeah.

Brain, the heart, the pancreas.

coronary heart disease, dementia, diabetes, it accelerates blindness.

Yeah.