Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Ella Kissi-Debrah's health crisis?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. Before we get into today's episode, I just want to say that we're getting advertising from various companies about AI products, but we are going to be rethinking our policy on all of this. For those who have been writing to us, we are reading your comments. We totally hear you.
We have to take a lot into account to try to keep this show going, and there are some balances we need to strike, but sometimes we make the wrong call. So I just wanted to say thank you for getting in touch, and now on with the show. Recently, the Trump administration has been rolling back protections that are designed to keep the air clean in the US.
And he's been making it easier for certain industries to pump potentially dangerous chemicals into the air.
They want to make pollution great again. So in case you don't know, the EPA just announced that they're doing massive deregulation. It means pollutants from cars, trucks and power plants will no longer be regulated at the federal level.
We cancel the EPA's absurd regulation. Just totally absurd tailpipe emission standards, which was a disaster.
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Chapter 2: How did Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah investigate her daughter's illness?
Trump says that he's doing this to save money for the automotive and fossil fuel industry and to make cars cheaper for consumers. And since he's said that climate change is a scam, he's obviously not worrying about that, unlike us.
But the thing is, even away from climate change, these changes that he's making, it made us at Science Versus want to go back to an episode that we published several years ago. It's one that I find myself thinking about a lot these days. And I won't say too much more about it. I've probably said too much already, but... Except that this story unfolds as a medical mystery. So let's just jump in.
Chapter 3: Why is air pollution considered a serious health threat?
To tell us about it is Rosamund Adu Kisidebra. She's a former teacher in London.
One second, one second. This is my daughter.
Chapter 4: What role did air pollution play in Ella's diagnosis?
Let's see what she thinks. Hi, bubs. Can you do what?
Yeah, okay. I love you too. Bye. Rosamund is a single mum. And just as we got on the call, one of her twins phoned. It was about her birthday.
What does she want? For one day in the year, I allow them to have chocolate cereal. Oh, do you want a chocolate cereal? Of course, she makes me sound like such a strict mum. Oh, Lord. She did say, I love you at the end. So see, I'm doing good.
But our story today isn't about the twins or chocolate cereal. It's about Rosamund and her oldest daughter, Ella. She was the big sister to those twins. She had big brown eyes and often wore her hair in braids. Rosamund told us that she loved to swim and bike and she was super competitive.
Like she would play chess, connect four. So she was into board games. She was into beating people, you know, like luring people in, pretending that, you know, like a chess game was equal. Then when you got comfortable, bang, bang, bang, checkmate. Mom, would you like to play chess? No, thank you very much, Ella. I don't want to play chess with you.
So Ella was smart. At nine years old, she was picking up Jane Eyre. And just the other day, Rosamund found this book that Ella had been reading. It was called The Observer Book of Genius.
So who did Ella compare herself to? I thought, let me have a look in there. Plato, she would. Pythagoras. So she had a great sense of humor.
But a few years before all this, Ella's life had taken a turn. It started in October 2010, when she was six years old. Ella and her mum had gone to visit the Monument to the Great Fire of London. It's this tall tower, and to get to the top, you have to walk up more than 300 steps. So together, they were climbing this tall tower. But weirdly, Ella was struggling.
She'd been a little sick, had a bit of a cough.
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Chapter 5: How did the coroner determine the cause of Ella's death?
Little did I know, it was the beginning of the end.
That night on the way home, Ella fell asleep on the train, which was also strange. And from there... Things got bad. Quickly. That little cough that Ella had turned into these terrible coughing fits that seemed to come out of nowhere. Sometimes she'd cough so hard that she couldn't breathe.
What used to happen is she used to get so much mucus, her lungs would collapse and she would stop breathing. So we had to resuscitate her to live.
And because oxygen wasn't getting into her brain, sometimes she'd have a seizure and even pass out.
And by Christmas time, she had been admitted to ICU for the first time. She was admitted to hospital 28 times.
28 times?
Yes. Yes.
So she had hundreds of attacks. And the scariest part of this was that Rosamund didn't know why any of this was happening. How did her kid go from being perfectly healthy to being in the ICU in just a couple of months? Ella would go to some of the best doctors in London, many different hospitals, and yet no-one could tell them what was going on.
After the break, the story of Ella's medical mystery... and how it made the invisible visible. Welcome back. Where we left off, Ella, who had been this really healthy little kid, was now in and out of hospital, and her mum was desperate to figure out what was making her sick. What did doctors tell you, you know, when you were going into hospital?
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Chapter 6: What changes have been made in response to Ella's case?
So it didn't make sense she had it.
Yeah. Most of the people with cough syncope are middle-aged men who have been smoking for years. It rarely happens to kids. One of Ella's doctors said that her case was so odd that they wanted to write about it in a medical journal, which Ella was actually kind of excited about.
And Ella would go on to be written up in many medical journals, making international news and helping perhaps thousands of people breathe easier. But in the middle of all this, Rosamund and Ella didn't know any of that. And then there was this one final but really important mystery here. If this truly was asthma, then what was triggering it?
For most asthmatics, you get an attack because it's triggered by something. Cigarette smoke, mould, cleaning products. That stuff gets in your lungs and causes this huge inflammatory reaction and then your airways constrict. But doctors tested Ella for all kinds of stuff, and none of those triggers made sense. And the thing is, Ella didn't always have attacks.
They'd come in clusters, but when she was feeling OK, Rosamund would try hard to keep things normal.
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Chapter 7: How is air pollution linked to broader health issues?
Ella loved listening to music, so they'd put on her favourite songs and dance around to them. Rosamund remembers this one song that she loved by Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z. It had just come out. This was early 2013. It's called Suit and Tie.
See, I can see her dancing. And Ella used to, like, jump on the sofa. So you know how Justin used to jump. I'm like, Mama, don't break your neck. Seriously, Mama, don't break it. We have enough problems, I used to say to her.
Soon after, Ella had another asthma attack. Rosamund said that it started out just like a normal night. Ella was listening to music, Skyfall by Adele. She was kind of obsessed with that song.
And I remember that night she was in the playroom on the computer playing Skyfall again and again. And I remember because it was Valentine's Day and I'd gone and bought food, I was cooking. I was like, look, you need to go and have a shower and be ready to come and eat because we needed to eat by a certain time. You know, we had school the following day.
And I remember, so my kids will say to you, oh, mum shouted at her the night before she left. I was like, look, I know what happened wasn't meant to happen, but we need to eat and I've cooked. And there she is on there. And I remember being so upset when Adele won the Oscar that Ella wasn't alive to see it.
Ella had a coughing fit that led to a seizure and then a heart attack. She died in the middle of the night at 3am on February 15th, 2013. In the UK, when someone dies of unknown causes, a coroner is called in to do the assessment. In 2014, the coroner declared that Ella died as a combination of acute respiratory failure and severe asthma. But still, none of this made sense to Rosamund.
And she still wanted to understand what had triggered the attacks. What killed Ella?
It was important to know why she died. She has siblings. And I knew as they got older, you know, what was I going to say? She got asthma. Why? How? I had no answers.
The coroner's report was mostly useless to Rosamund. Except there was this one thing. A clue.
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Chapter 8: What ongoing efforts are being made to improve air quality?
her trigger was to do with something in the air. It didn't specifically state what it was. And that gave me some hope. I thought, oh, at least this is a bit further than we've got before.
To push it even further, she started doing a bunch of media interviews.
to say, look, this is what's happened to my daughter. If anyone's got any ideas out there, if they can help me get to the bottom of this mysterious thing, can they let me know? And that is how the ball began to roll.
People got in touch from all over the country, throwing out all kinds of ideas for what might have happened to Yaa. And this eventually led her to Stephen Holgate, a professor at the University of Southampton who specialises in asthma and allergies. One day in 2016, he was on the train heading home from London.
On the long journey back, he picked up the standard and he was reading it.
I happened to pick up the evening standard and I saw Rosamund Kissy Deborah. I mean, it was just a dreadfully sad story.
Stephen had spent his entire career researching asthma, getting to know the lungs inside and out. And here was his life's work sitting in front of him in the form of a medical mystery.
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.
He got in touch with Rosamund and said, would you mind if I look through your daughter's medical records? And she was like, yes, go for it. Handed them over and Stephen dove in.
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