Leaving the city cured my girl’s ‘asthma’
The TV weather presenter tells PAT HAGAN how moving out from London to the countryside transformed her daughter’s health
AS A meteorologist and TV weather presenter Clare Nasir could rightly be considered something of an expert on the growing problem of Britain’s air pollution. But even she admits to being taken aback at the impact that moving from crowded London to leafy Cheshire had on the health of her eight-year-old daughter Sienna.
As a toddler living in the capital, Sienna needed to use an asthma inhaler most days just to keep her airways open and ease the wheezing and coughing that struck whenever the family ventured outdoors.
But in the small town of Wilmslow, just south of Manchester, and with the countryside on the doorstep, her lungs are clear and the inhaler is no longer used.
“It’s been in the cupboard gathering dust since we moved here six years ago,” says Clare, 47, who relocated when her husband, BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Chris Hawkins, 42, moved with his job.
“We could not believe the transformation in her health. Almost instantly the coughing and wheezing stopped and she’s hardly used the inhaler since.
“In London we lived within a few hundred metres of the A1, one of the main routes in and out of the city. When Sienna was a baby we tried to get her out in the fresh air as much as possible.
“But we realise now that it was damaging her lungs.”
Now Clare, an ambassador for the Healthy Air Campaign, is backing an awareness project by high street pharmacist Boots to highlight the role that filthy inner-city air plays in worsening the symptoms of hay fever.
It has carried out a survey of 2,000 adults which shows most people think exposure to pollen in rural areas is a much bigger problem than urban smog.
Only one in four people quizzed associated air pollution with making their hay fever symptoms worse, a problem that Boots has dubbed “pollenution”.
Commuting and pollution statistics suggest the five UK hotspots most likely to be affected by “pollenution” over the next few months are London, Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow.
PRIME Minister Theresa May has warned air pollution is the fourth biggest health risk behind cancer, obesity and heart disease, and high levels of emissions by diesel-powered vehicles are largely to blame.
“Air pollution is a huge problem,” says Clare, who presents the weather on Channel 5 but has previously worked for the BBC and ITV and has written a series of children’s books.
“Government statistics show it already kills around 40,000 people a year in the UK.
“When Sienna first started coughing and wheezing as an infant we blamed it on the fact that she was born two months prematurely.
“As a newborn she needed to be given steroids as her lungs were not fully developed and there were a few occasions where she turned blue from breathing problems.
“It was a pretty traumatic time for me and Chris.”
When Sienna turned one her parents took her to a GP because of her persistent coughing and wheezing. The doctor said she was displaying “asthma-like symptoms”.
This is not a diagnosis of asthma but means the patient is suffering breathing difficulties that get worse in the cold, wheezing that gets worse early in the morning or at night and a tight feeling in the chest. Sienna was prescribed Ventolin, an inhaler that makes it easier to breathe by opening up the airways when they get congested.
“There were periods when she needed it every day in London yet we could not work out what was triggering her symptoms,” says Clare. “It [the inhaler] helped but in reality it was merely putting a sticking plaster over the problem.
“What we realised later was that babies are especially vulnerable to the effects of air pollution. She was two-and-a-half when we moved away from London to Cheshire and the improvement in her health was almost instant.”
Beverley Adams-Groom, a scientist at the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit at the University of Worcester, says: “Studies have shown that air pollution can make hay fever symptoms worse and that even when the pollen count is relatively low it can still have an impact on hay fever sufferers, as air pollution enhances the effects of pollen.”
Around 13 million people in the UK suffer with hay fever caused by pollen.
It is a fine powder released by plants as part of their reproductive cycle.
Most sufferers rely on over-the-counter medicines, such as antihistamine tablets, to relieve their symptoms.
Histamine is a chemical released when the body detects something harmful such as an infection.
But in hay fever sufferers the body mistakes harmless pollen as a threat and pumps out high levels of histamine.
Clare says Sienna is now in fine health and likes nothing more than a game of dodgeball, an increasingly popular sport where two teams try to hit opponents with a ball.
“If we had stayed in London she would probably still be needing her inhaler most days,” says Clare.
“Now she loves her dodgeball and is planning to do a 10k run with me in the future.”