Girl, 10, saves her gran from 'silent killer' after attending school safety workshop

Connie Burslem attended a Crucial Crew workshop with her school in March, where she was given a carbon monoxide alarm to take away - she gave it to her grandmother

A 10-year-old girl saved her grandmother from carbon monoxide poisoning after going to a safety workshop at school and giving her an alarm which detected a potentially fatal attack.

Connie Burslem, who is now 11, from Monton, near Manchester, took part in a Crucial Crew workshop with her classmates at St Mary’s RC Primary School in Eccles back in March. She learned about several key safety issues, including the dangers of carbon monoxide.

Each pupil was given a carbon monoxide detector to take home, but since Connie had two alarms at her house already, she decided to give it to her 79-year-old grandmother Pauline in Cadishead. Two days later, the alarm raised an alert; Pauline thought it was malfunctioning at first.

An urgent call to Cadent, the gas distribution company, and their subsequent inspection revealed a dangerous CO leak coming from Pauline's kitchen appliance. Pauline had been suffering from unexplained headaches and "dizzy spells" and had sought medical advice without any definitive diagnosis.

It wasn't until the hazardous cooker was removed that Pauline began to improve almost instantly. The granddaughter-grandmother duo are now eager to share their story, emphasising the silent peril posed by CO leaks.

Pauline said: "If she hadn’t gone to the Crucial Crew workshop, and she hadn’t got the alarm and she hadn’t given it to me, then who knows? " I’m out on a limb here... and nobody has any need to come here.

“If I hadn’t had the alarm, the Cadent man said to me, ‘You’d have probably become more sleepy and you could have easily just gone to sleep’. I thought, if that was a Friday night, nobody would know or think about it until Monday, and then you’d be dead. She literally did save my life.”

According to Cadent, each year there are around 40 deaths in England and Wales from CO poisoning. CO is a poisonous gas that poses a serious threat to health if exposure occurs, and it cannot be detected by smell, taste or sight.

Early this year, Pauline said she started to experience “dizzy spells”, almost causing her to fall over, along with headaches and fatigue, but she could not determine the cause. “One day, when I went to pick Connie up from school, I was walking along the pavement and I was veering right into the wall and I could not stop myself,” Pauline explained.

“I thought, ‘What is going on?'” Pauline visited her GP, who completed tests but “couldn’t find anything wrong” – and after calling the local hospital, doctors suggested it could be related to Pauline’s perforated eardrum, which occurred three years ago.

Connie admitted she never expected CO poisoning to affect her family, remarking, "It’s more likely something you’d see in a movie." She's just releived she gifted one to her gran. Despite Cadent's advice that every room with a fuel-burning appliance should have an audible CO detector, Pauline only had one in her living room before the gift.

"A couple of days later, the alarm went off, and I thought, ‘What’s that? '" Pauline recounted. "I went in the kitchen and I realised it was very loud, and I thought, ‘I wonder if it’s faulty? ’ That was my first thought because I’d only had it up two days."

She continued: "I rang the emergency helpline... and someone from Cadent came in a quarter of an hour. He went all over the house, everywhere, every room, and he said, ‘It’s your cooker, it’s actually leaking carbon monoxide’."

Following the incident, where a condemn notice was slapped on her cooker and she was provided with an electric hob, Pauline ordered a new cooker and pondered over her previous symptoms, which she feared might be dementia. "It didn’t even occur to me that it could be related to carbon monoxide, and I never had any dizzy spells after that, so I knew it must have been the leak from the cooker," she explained.

"I was relieved because I don’t take pills, I don’t tend to get ill... and I was beginning to wonder when I was walking into walls, ‘What on Earth is happening to me? ’". After the cooker was removed, Pauline's health improved significantly. She even penned a heartfelt letter to the school workshop team, thanking them for their role in highlighting the danger.

She remarked, "the timing was perfect" regarding the CO alarm and is now advocating for everyone, especially the elderly and those living alone, to install alarms and pay attention to any odd symptoms.

She said: “You always think it happens to somebody else and you always think you’re invincible. I know they say it’s the silent killer… but people don’t tend to think about carbonmonoxide. In the case of people my age, if you did get dizzy spells, don’t just presume it’s old age.”

Asked how Connie felt after “saving her Nanna’s life”, she said “heroic” and “tremendous”. She added: “Don’t expect it not to happen to you because it can.”

New data from Cadent has highlighted UK household exposures to carbonmonoxide are chronically underreported, with the correct figure as much as seven times higher. Cadent has collaborated with more than 30 organisations on a new eco-system to gather data about “the silent killer” and trial new solutions. To find out more, visit: cadentgas.com.