We’ve changed the law – but it won’t bring back Natasha
The parents of the teen who died after eating a Pret sandwich tell Eleanor Steafel about their fight
There was a moment during the inquest into the death of their daughter, Natasha, that Tanya and Nadim Ednan-laperouse will never forget. It had been two years since their bright, beautiful 15-yearold died after suffering an allergic reaction to a Pret sandwich in the middle of a flight and they were still waiting for answers.
The chief flight attendant on the British Airways plane travelling from Heathrow to Nice stepped up to give evidence. Asked why the junior doctor desperately trying to save Natasha had not been informed about the defibrillator on board, he said he couldn’t get to it because, at that stage of the flight, his responsibility was to cover the plane’s front door in case of emergency. “Without sounding harsh,” he said, “the coverage of doors takes priority.”
It was then that Tanya and Nadim broke down. “She was dying in front of him, on the floor at his feet, and he wouldn’t think at any point to say ‘we have a defibrillator on board’?” asks Nadim, in disbelief.
It has been three years since the inquest, five since Natasha’s death, but the memories of that terrible day and the testimonies from the coroner’s court are as raw as ever.
The unused defibrillator, it transpired, was just one in a string of missed moments, from the failure of the French paramedics’ defibrillator to work when they landed, to the length of the needles in the Epipens Natasha carried which may have reduced their efficiency, to a loophole in the law which meant Pret (and other firms like it) were not obliged to provide a full list of allergens on their made-in-store products.
A new law, which the couple have campaigned for and comes into force this Friday – known as Natasha’s Law – will require full allergen details on all packaged foods made on site in shops and cafés.
Nadim, 56, was on the plane with his daughter and her best friend, Bethany. His memories of watching Natasha die in front of him are the kind that haunt parents’ nightmares, not least those with allergic children.
Halfway through the flight, within minutes of eating a Pret artichoke and olive baguette, Natasha was struggling to breathe and asking her dad for her Epipen. She had a severe sesame allergy and had no idea there was sesame in the bread.
She and her parents were used to scrutinising everything. Natasha had suffered her first allergic reaction at six-months-old, after eating a tiny piece of banana while on holiday with her parents in Menorca. It sent her into anaphylactic shock. A dairy allergy meant she had the same reaction to formula milk at nine-months-old, and again as a two-year-old when she touched her lip with a sesame-covered breadstick. So, from early on, her parents knew they had to tread with the utmost caution when it came to Natasha’s diet.
“When you have food allergies, it’s very difficult to trust anything outside what you make from scratch in your own home,” says Tanya, sitting next to her husband in their home in west London, which is filled with pictures of their beloved daughter. “We didn’t really take Natasha to cafés.”
They had tried to eat out with her, but found they could seldom rest assured it was safe. Even when a chef insisted he used only vegetable oil, on inspecting the oil drum itself in the restaurant kitchen, Natasha’s parents discovered it contained peanut oil.
The problem, they say, was that big food businesses were using a law intended for small cafés and delis where food was made on site and – crucially – the customer could have a conversation with the person making it. Under this law, full ingredient labelling wasn’t required.
As Pret, at the time, was obeying this law, they did not need to state that the bread in Natasha’s ostensibly safe sandwich, in fact, contained sesame seeds that weren’t visible.
When Natasha reacted to the sandwich on the plane, Nadim administered the first pen, then the second, but neither had an effect; Natasha passed out and went into cardiac arrest. A junior doctor, who happened to be on the plane, began administering CPR. On landing in Nice, paramedics rushed on board.
“The [paramedics] had a defibrillator with them,” explains Tanya, who was 800 miles away in London, desperately trying to get a flight out. “They tried to attach it to Natasha but it wasn’t working. One of them got off the plane quickly, ran back to the airport to find a working defibrillator and the whole time there was one on the plane.
“They brought the defibrillator back and her heartbeat came back, after all that time. You couldn’t believe it, you high-fived, and it went. Then it came back again, and then it went and it didn’t come back.”
They will never know whether employing a defibrillator earlier could have saved Natasha, who was transferred to hospital in Nice and put on a life-support machine. “She looked completely different,” Nadim says, his voice thick with tears. “Somebody came in to say we’re going to switch off the life-support machine now.”
The unutterable trauma of that moment is still etched on Nadim’s face today. “You look at your child who’s dead and you go: ‘What do I do?’”
Following a campaign by a lobbying group led by Nadim and Tanya, as of this Friday food businesses will be required to provide full ingredient lists and allergen labelling on foods prepackaged for direct sale on the premises.
Natasha’s Law will put the UK ahead of the curve, say her parents. They hope other countries will follow the UK’S example. But not everyone has welcomed the changes. “The food industry was against Natasha’s Law,” says Nadim. “They cried, ‘this is going to kill us.’ But that’s not the case.”
A year on from the inquest, Pret has introduced Natasha’s Law in every branch. Tanya and Nadim, who runs a toy company, met the owners and CEO for an in-person apology, and received a donation to the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation.
“They wanted to make it right,” says Tanya. “It was really at that point that we felt we could move on with our blame by being able to actually forgive them, because until that point it was really hard walking along the high street seeing a Pret a Manger on every corner.”
The food industry has, she says, been working from the assumption there are 10-20 allergy deaths in the UK per year; there could be far more.
‘Her primary cause of death was down as asthma – the coroner questioned it’
“Natasha’s pathologist put her primary cause of death down as asthma – the coroner questioned it,” she says. “We’ve been to a number of inquests of children and young people who have died since, and all of them had cause of death: asthma.
“Our lawyers were lawyers for two of those inquests and they managed to get it changed, because we’d caused the precedent.”
Allergies are growing by five per cent in the UK every year. The foundation that Tanya and Nadim (who were recently made OBES for their work) set up in Natasha’s name is working to fund research in the field.
Above all, they are determined Natasha’s death won’t be in vain. “You know you’ll never get them back, but if you can somehow stop other families from experiencing what you’ve experienced,” says Tanya. “You just don’t want them to go to where you are.”