Nalleli Cobo: the young activist who led her LA neighbourhood against big oil

After forcing the closure of an oilwell that was making her family and community sick, Cobo seemed about to become a household name - but then she fell seriously ill

At the age of nine, Nalleli Cobo started getting nosebleeds so severe that she had to sleep sitting up so as not to choke on the blood. Then there were the stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and body spasms, which made walking difficult. For a time she wore a heart monitor as doctors struggled to understand what was wrong.

But it wasn't just Cobo. The nine-year-old was growing up in University Park, a low-income, majority-Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, the smoggiest city in the US, which ranks highest in the country for deaths linked to air pollution. She and her three older siblings were raised by her Mexican mother, grandmother and two great-grandparents. (Her father was deported to Colombia when she was three.) And suddenly, almost her entire family was ill - including her mother, who developed asthma at 40, as did her grandmother at 70.