Positive News · 14 hours ago

London’s Ulez Linked to Healthier Lung Growth in Children

When a nine-year-old girl named Ella died of an asthma attack in 2013 - her death later attributed in part to the polluted air near her London home - her mother began campaigning for change, and cities began asking what change was actually possible. Seven years after London introduced its Ultra Low Emission Zone, a five-year study of more than 3,400 primary school children offers a quietly remarkable answer: lungs that had been growing more slowly than those of children in cleaner areas began, after the zone was introduced, to catch up. Prof Chris Griffiths, one of the study's senior authors, said he was "absolutely stunned" by the speed of the improvement. What the research reveals is that the damage pollution does to developing bodies is not fixed - that given cleaner air, children's lungs can recover - and that behind the political arguments over daily charges and emissions data, something as intimate and essential as a child's breath was quietly being restored.