Untold: Opus Dei - Toxic Legacy, Ep. 1: Silent Danger

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Laura Hughes receives a tip that horses are dropping dead in Wales. As she investigates, she finds decades of academic studies researching the problem. She learns these aren’t isolated incidents. Something is spreading across the countryside. It’s undetectable to humans, nobody knows it’s there — until they fall ill.For more information on how to live safely with lead, please visit the LEAPP Alliance website.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you go through into the garden, I'll let the dogs out into the other side. I lived in the big house up there, I brought my children up, the majority of from the teens onwards. We had pigs, sows, pregnant sows. We had ducks, chickens, goats, dogs, cats. 30 years ago, a mother of five, will call her Sylvia, moved to a picturesque spot in West Wales. It wasn't just the house she loved. It was the land it came with. For Sylvia, it was the perfect place to bring up her young children

and fulfill her dream of raising animals. It was the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. Only one neighbour tried to warn her. That her new home might not be as perfect as it seemed. One old man said to me, You'll never get sheep to live there. I didn't say why. And I thought I haven't got sheep, so, you know.

It took about six months before Sylvia noticed something was wrong with her garden. Nothing would grow. The grass didn't grow. We didn't get lush long grass in the spring. It was tan colour in the winter, like it had been burnt. One day, Sylvia noticed something wasn't right with one of her horses, a black mare. A massive tumour had formed under the horse's skin. She had what I can only describe as a bunch of grapes coming from her back end.

Sylvia suspected cancer, so she called her vet. And he said, oh, yes, I'm sorry, I'll just go get my, you know, and he, she was, she died. Then four months later Sylvia pulled into her driveway to find another horse had died. It had happened again. This time, it was a young horse named Ruby.

I'd come back with the other children in the car and Ruby was dead in the field, just dead. And it was horrible. She was a 10-month-old. It kept happening. We lost piglets. probably about eight piglets

all died it was it was weird it was getting weirder and weirder ducks died chickens died sylvia

couldn't keep her animals alive you didn't know what you were going to wake up to the next morning that's how bad it was is there going to be another dead animal

she would take care of the bodies and her children would look on it was horrendous it's seeing the dead bodies and not knowing why and if they're dying then what's happening to us? Hello? Hi, ma'am.

Good morning. Sylvia's second oldest, who we're calling Lily, was 13 at the time. Considering it was 30 years ago, it's a big impact. Still, sorry. When Lily was growing up, she spent more time than any. anyone outside. She was happiest when riding her horses. They would spend hours up in the hills and mountains surrounding the house. She would stop to take sips of water from the stream. It was a quiet, idyllic childhood. But unnerving things started happening to Lily as well.

Your teeth weren't green, didn't they? Not your teeth, your gums went green. Do you remember that? My gums and my hair had a strange green change to it. I remember repeatedly saying, have you cleaned your teeth? But it was when, yes, I have, yes, I have. Oh, I mean watching her. And then, oh, it's still there. Around the same time, Lily had begun having trouble at school. It was unlike her.

Her behaviour seemed to have changed. It was very depressed. at the time. I don't think my attendance at school had been very good since probably second year of secondary school. And I never got back from that. I think I sat one of my GCSE exams. I just didn't turn up for the rest. All of it seemed inexplicable. If Ruby had not dropped dead suddenly, we might not have known and goodness knows what could have happened. Sylvia called the vet to investigate Ruby's death, the second horse that died on their land.

And so the vet did an autopsy. He rang me and he said she's got four times the amount of lead in her than is ever expected. That was when I started looking things up. She learned lead is toxic, dangerous to animals and humans, especially children. So they went to the doctor for tests. Sylvia and Lily both had elevated levels of lead in their bodies.

When we learn about the lead, it just broke us, you know? It broke me, knowing that it's so toxic. The source of the lead, in hindsight, was obvious. About a quarter of mile above us, was a disused lead mine, and it's quite a large one. Sylvia had no idea her land was contaminated with lead, and probably had been, for quite some time. It's still hard for her to reckon with today.

And I felt like I'd just pulled my head out from the sand because it was horrendous. Why didn't I, why didn't I do something about it at the time? I should have done, I should have done. Nothing I can do now. for us land should have been living the dream and it was a nightmare. Sylvia and Lily's story from 30 years ago

in the remote mountains of West Wales may feel far removed. But the poisoning of her family and her home is just one example of something much deeper happening across the United Kingdom. My name is Laura Hughes. I'm a reporter for the financial times. And for the past two years, I've been uncovering the UK's perplexing relationship with lead.

I started with lead mines, but quickly realised this is a problem that goes much bigger, much wider. Traces of old lead are laced throughout the UK. It's in soil, in water, in houses and in food. And while the dangers of lead are recognised around the world, they are largely overlooked in the UK. At almost every point in my reporting, I found a government who has largely turned a blind eye to the threat of lead poisoning

and a near total absence of widespread regulations to protect public health. The result? Generations of Britons, poisoned. I think the most terrifying thing is that once it's happened, there's not really an easy route out of it. The damage is done. You've already exposed your children to something that could cause them long-term damage. The ladies there ticking along, incrementing a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little more, a little more damage, a little more damage.

And you feel like a conspiracy theorist, if you talk to people, like, neighbours are interested, kind of. And they're like, oh, you know, something else that will kill you. That's what people have got the attitude of. It's just another thing in our world that's killing us. Every American child is tested for this, so why isn't every British child tested for it too? Why in Britain are we failing to prevent a preventable disease? It's been convenient to push the blame onto people,

and they're failing at one of the most basic functions of government, which is to protect its citizens. At the time, for me, it was like, if I report this, people are going to hate me. I won't move on with my life. And I was so petrified of being dragged across the coals for reporting them. And I still am.

For the Financial Times, this is season three of Untold. Toxic Legacy. Episode 1. Silent Danger Just a few years ago, in 2023, I received a tip. It was about horses. dying in Wales. The tip was that these deaths

were somehow linked to a kind of pollution, leaching out of old lead mines in the countryside. Things like this are out of my remit. I cover public policy issues in England. I'm not an environmental reporter

and I'm hardly any kind of pollution expert. But I started looking into it. It sounded like a horror film. So it surprised me. when I couldn't find much public information. Then I stumbled across a report. Someone had commissioned a study tasked with a figuring out

what was happening to the horses in Wales. The study was led by a young academic. I contacted her. Her name is Andrea. I'm Dr. Andreas Hartorius, and I'm an egotoxychologist who works at the University of Nottingham. I study lead mines and the full,

ecosystem effects that they have on the surrounding environments. Andrea was passionate and sharp. The first time I spoke with her, I knew she'd be one of my main sources. For her research, Andrea travelled to West Wales. Her first task was to scout old lead mine sites and the areas around the mines, where people were living. So on that first day when we went and visited the sites, it was a beautiful, really sunny day. It was actually quite warm, very simple.

surprising for October of Wales. And it was so absolutely lovely there. I remember thinking this is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. She was struck by West Wales. How idyllic the landscape was. These are picture postcard scenes. There were a lot of locals spend their Saturdays. People love going up to walk on the mine sites there.

It's very common to have footpaths there, have cycling there. People walk their dogs. They ride horses. and they just enjoy it as they would any other part of the landscape. These hillsides are dotted with old stone building ruins and mine shafts. Though the lead mines are all shut down now, that's where Andrea began collecting samples. She filled test tubes with dirt, water, sand.

Then she moved to nearby properties and onto bigger things. We tested horses, we tested cats, dogs, sheep, chicken. pretty much any animal that we could get our hands on we were testing for lead concentrations. It was when they took their samples back to the lab and the data came in that Andrea had to sit down. I was pretty gobsmacked,

but somewhere that looked so beautiful and felt so natural and in touch was actually very, very polluted. They found lead in levels that were higher than Andrea had anticipated. much higher. We found incredibly high concentrations, especially in the pastures that the horses were grazing in, which really set off our alarm bells.

In the places around the mines, elevated levels were to be expected. But as she tested further and further outside of the mine sites into the surrounding countryside, the data showed those levels were high as well. And so the pollution in the environment was likely deposited there maybe hundreds of years when the mines were active, but they were still going into local wildlife, for example.

Andrea's research suggested that the land was toxic. Worse is what Andrea found in the wildlife samples. In the animals, there were potentially fatal levels of lead in their system. It was the lead that was causing these mysterious horse deaths. Almost three decades are forced. to Sylvia's horses had also died from lead poisoning in West Wales. It was still happening. And it begged the question, if the lead was killing horses,

what was it doing to the people who were living there too? I don't think it would occur to most people to even be concerned about that. People don't really know that there's a potential risk. They're just not well informed about this at all. And you're talking hundreds of thousands of people, the UK. It's not just a couple farms. It's not unique to a couple villages here and there. The data Andrea collected suggested this was much more than just some polluted grazing fields. Her research was beginning to point to something much more systemic.

There are thousands of mines located across England and Wales in particular, and these mine sites aren't all mapped. We can only estimate the number of minds and I've seen estimates of everything from about 3,000 to about 10,000. Everything I was learning from Andrea's research was extraordinary to me. I found myself thinking about the implications

of what I was learning. For what initially seemed like a random tip outside of my area of coverage, I kept pulling in more and more of my focus. I wondered about the scale of the problem. This part of Wales wasn't the only place in the UK with old lead mines. Where else could be contaminated? For the next year, finding the answer to these questions would take me all over the UK. First, I knew I had to go to West Wales myself.

So I got in my car with no real plan other than to knock on people's doors and get a feel for how big this might be. Yeah, look, look how steep this is? I mean, there was a farm around here. In Wales, I went from farmhouse to farmhouse, knocked on door after door. I asked people what they knew about lead pollution in the area. It's fair to say I received a mixed reception.

Upon finding out that I was a reporter, a sizable number of people declined to speak to me. They didn't want to hear about animal deaths. At one point, I was even accused of being part of a global conspiracy to bring down the farming industry. The people who did talk to me requested total anonymity. Their stories confirmed what Andrea was telling me. More unusual animal deaths, produce that just wouldn't grow.

Some farmers did know there was lead in their environment, at least to some extent. They were just living with it. Everyone's very friendly, unless you're asking them, are they poisoning their neighbours. A queue has gathered outside a village hall in West Wales. FT producer Persis Love and I follow the queue inside. A man is stationed at a folding table with two other volunteers.

From locals, he's taking sandwich bags and old ice cream tubs, filled with dirt from their gardens. Can you fill in this little data for? Certainly. For each of the samples, you've got two samples, have you? Yes. Are they from... He instructs each person to fill out their name and where they live,

and what part of their land they've collected this soil from. Right. Next man? So I've got two. One is these soil... These men aren't government officials. They're not part of the local council. They're just volunteering their time.

One of these volunteers is Professor Mark Macklin. He's been studying metal mine pollution around the world for over 40 years. And over the years, some of his research was commissioned by the UK government. So Mark's findings are not exactly a secret to government officials. We'll get to that later. Mark's more recent research estimates that in the UK today, as many as half a million people, are currently living on floodplains, contaminated by historic metal mining.

And the floodplain that's contaminated? It's Mark's own neighbourhood. This area was badly affected by flooding in June 2012. And one of the outcomes of that was severe lead contamination in this whole region. And so he felt he had to start organising, a response on his own. Through a WhatsApp group,

Mark has asked people to bring soil samples. When they get to the front of the line, he asks them where their gardens are located. He wants to know how close they live to one of the local rivers. And he specifically wants to know if their property floods. Are you flooded in 2012? Are you around or not? Yes.

We were flooded, but not catastrophically is flooded. This village in Wales has a deep history of mine. dating back to a boom in the 1800s. Its rivers once powered a hub of huge lead mines in the area. But just over a decade ago, those rivers flooded, as did local houses and gardens. It was catastrophic. I start chatting with the people in the line.

You only knew to test because just someone told you in the area. Yeah, after we bought it, yeah. And it wasn't an official leaflet that came to your door saying. came through your door saying. It's just neighbours talking to neighbours. This is a woman named Ruth. I mean, how do you feel about that? I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

Your soil looks totally. I mean, this soil looks fine. You would have no idea. When Ruth makes it to the front of the line, Mark takes her bag of soil and they head outside to test it. All right, let's try me. You've got the other one as well.

Stand behind him. behind and that's fine. Just because it's an X-ray. Mark and the other volunteers have a gadget that looks like it's right out of Star Trek. It's a portable X-ray gun that gives lightning quick results. Within 30 seconds to a minute, they tell people whether their soil is potentially hazardous. It feels a little like a game of Russian roulette. Ruth stands next to them, watching as the soil samples from her garden as the soil samples

her garden are zapped. Okay, so here are your numbers. The results are almost instant. It's positive. There is lead in Ruth's soil. It's about half a gram per kilo. So what, okay. So what can you do about it?

You can't, you can't remediate it. You have to know where it is. Okay. And the scale of it is so large. Mark tells Ruth that there's no way to remove the lead from her soil. But he says you can manage how you interact with it. Learn what is and isn't safe to do around it.

The volunteers tell Ruth that while her soil isn't what they call safe, she's actually pretty lucky. It's so much worse in other parts of this countryside. Just that morning, Mark tested soil with levels more than 10 times what Ruth has. The problem is downstream of the mines, because that's where people grow stuff. That's where your chickens pack and graze and the rest of it. That's where people live. As I look around the hall, I wonder why this doesn't feel more official.

Should there just be a volunteer effort? And if there's lead in these people's gardens, should they really be figuring out next steps on their own? But Mark says that's all they've got right now. And the lead isn't going anywhere. It won't degrade. It just makes its way into other things. The legacy remains that our river channels and floodplains are incredibly contaminated.

The big problem is the lead within those sediments, they don't biodegrade. They simply get remobilised. They get moved downstream. And they remain in terms of human timescales forever. and then it gets taken up in the food chain. The food chain, meaning the produce that grows in gardens and farms and feeds countless people.

This point about the food chain, it reminded me of something and Andrea's report that I haven't told you about yet. As I drove away from the village hall, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I went into this PhD project really interested in the science side of things, wildlife, adaptation to pollution, and that was my perspective. I wasn't really thinking about humans or livestock.

But then within about 10 days of starting the project, we ended up going down to visit some of the farms that were impacted. And it was pretty clear that that wasn't the story here. Only a few months into my reporting, I had confirmed everything Andrea had told me from the outset. had seen the invisible, how plain-looking dirt could contain dangerous levels of lead, and how that contamination was ending up in land far from the old mine sites. Like me, Andrea had wanted to know the extent of this contamination. She was on a farm in West Wales when a realisation dawned on her. We realised that there were chickens on site that had very high bloodline.

lead concentrations. And because of that, we then grew curious about the eggs that these chickens were producing. Andrea tested those eggs. And not just once. She tested them again and again. So we kept on sampling these eggs and just found higher and higher lead concentrations over time in them. It turns out, on this farm, the chickens were kept beside a driveway, built with something called lead spoil. Around here, it's a very popular driveway. additive. It's excellent for weed prevention because nothing will grow in it. And it's free. Locals can drive up to the abandoned lead mines and shovel out all they want from the heaps. So on this farm, as the chickens pecked at the driveway, they were ingesting lead.

And that was passing through into their eggs, which could then be tossed into whatever consumes those. The eggs were toxic. Such high levels of lead in any food item would likely be deemed unfit for consumption. In other words, poisonous to humans. What's more, the farmer who owned the chickens, Andrea found out they weren't just eating these eggs. They were selling them too. It was also that they were sold at the farm gate and sold to locals in a local farmer's market. When Andrea found lead in the eggs, it became real.

Toxic lead was in the local food supply. So Andrea went to see one of the local farmers herself. She told the farmer that the eggs they were selling were contaminated, with enough lead to poison the people who regularly ate them. The owner stopped selling those eggs once we informed them about the lead concentrations in the eggs. But Andrea didn't stop at one farmer. She told as many as she could. And there were some who made other decisions.

Just to make it clear, nobody told any of the landowners to stop selling eggs, and that was a personal decision. I know there are other sites where landowners did, I tested their eggs for them, and they continued both selling and consuming the eggs themselves. In essence, these farms were selling lead exposure in the form of animal products, and nobody official had told them to stop. To my knowledge, those eggs are still being sold. There doesn't seem to be a functioning system to stop this from happening.

So I contacted the UK Food Standards Agency. They confirmed the UK does not have a safe lead threshold for eggs. Andrea had to use levels set by other countries to determine how toxic her samples were. The FSA told me it's the responsibility of businesses and local oil. authorities to keep food safe for public consumption. So I contacted local authorities in West Wales, and they confirmed that the people living in these areas have been given no official information on the risks of lead in their environment. I wondered if any of the UK's food was being tested for lead.

The government told me they do test food for heavy metals, but only a supermarket's shelf worth annually. which means in practice, food safety when it comes to lead in products is being left up to personal discretion. The eggs flawed me. When I tell people about my reporting on lead, I always start with the eggs. Andrea told me that eating lead-contaminated eggs could affect a child's cognitive development. I buy eggs from my neighbours and I feed them to my two children. So if I was living in one of these areas

where there are thousands of abandoned lead mines, I could be poisoning my own family. How many other families could be poisoning themselves? We estimate that there is 190 square kilometres of floodplain in Wales, which is significantly contaminated. And just to give that sort of bit of a moment, I think Birmingham is about 260 square kilometres.

So it's approaching those urban area sizes. So this is not an insignificant area of land. That's Professor Mark Macklin again. He's the one who was testing his neighbour's soil in the Welsh mining village. He's mapped the areas in the UK most affected by lead contamination. In fact, before he retired, it used to be his day job. He's made maps of lead contamination for high-risk areas around the world. We've developed a globally usable mapping and modelling tool.

We've actually refined that for the UK. Mark's map starts with the mine sites themselves. It sounds straightforward. But remember, there are only estimates of the number of lead mines in the UK. Part of the reason we can only estimate is because of how deep the UK's mining history goes. We've got a very long history, starting four and a half thousand years ago. We were the first industrial nation, and there was very large-scale mining.

And unfortunately, this took place without any environmental regulation. So much, if not all of the waste, was actually discharged in the nearest watercourses. The watercourses. the channels that run nearby or through the mine sites. Mark is an expert in these. He says not only are the watercourses contaminated, but they can spread that contamination, further away from the mine sites.

People might think that it's the mind itself, which is the problem. It is to some degree, but actually the bigger problem is the channels and flood plains downstream of those mines. He says it's a phenomenon that's been getting worse in recent years. We've got to be mindful that climate change is actually remobilising this, so we need to know where the flood risk zones are.

We've done that, we've mapped it, we can provide this. So the mine sites are points on the map, but around these points are much larger circles. These are the contamination zones, where you are most likely at risk of lead contamination if an area floods. Seeing it map out this way, the threat is no longer invisible. And those can be used in terms of where there's an issue, and people's lives, livelihoods can be protected.

The academics were all telling me the same thing. What was happening with the animals and the eggs is likely happening in other hotspots all over the UK. On Mark's map, there was one place in particular, that jumped out at me. It was covered in overlapping circles, an area in Yorkshire, which has the highest density of old lead mines

in the whole of the UK. If I wanted to know more about what was happening, I needed to go there. We lost nine sheep, equivalent to back then would be probably £1,500 in value. That's what, you know, you take, but, you know, and you talk to all the families, And you talk to all the farmers neighbouring,

and they're cattle farmers, not sheep farmers, we realise that they were having problems as well. You're hearing from a sheep farmer, 300 miles away from where we've been in Wales, in Yorkshire, England. We'll call him George. In general, farmers weren't eager to speak to me here either, and certainly not on record.

Yeah, they're really sweet. I don't know if you saw this little lamb here. This part of Yorkshire is home to almost two and a half thousand abandoned lead mines. That's more than double any other area in the UK. It's pretty common for George's land in Yorkshire to flood. One of the first times it happened, the lead run off from the floods killed George's lambs. If it happens again today, he just rotates the sheep off the contaminated land.

As I say, we have to manage it. knowing that what can happen, you know, and, you know, there's no, there's no compensation. It's just we have to take it on the chin and what have you. George, and so many other farmers I've met in my reporting, don't seem to be the kind to reach out for help. But I also wonder if anyone has ever offered it. But no one's ever come here looking for lead or...

No, nobody's not, you know, the EA or whatever. The EA is the UK's Environment Agency. The EA, whether they test the water in the river, I'm not aware of. But nobody's ever come and sample the soil or whatever. And George wanted to know, what if someone had come and tested? Then what? Would they help? Or would it make things even worse?

But if I had a problem and people said, well, we can't have, you can't produce lamb or whatever, what can I produce in that field? So I'm stuck, I can't produce livestock, so is somebody going to compensate me for the lack of earnings for land I can't use? And that's, hey, that's another avenue you can go down. But I'm one person you can talk to who's had a problem.

But you're one of how many more farmers? You're just one that's been very kind and spoken to me. But I don't think this is just... No, no. This is going to be representative of a whole load of farms. Oh yeah. Anywhere where, as we've said, anywhere where there's been lead mines and there's rivers coming down and land gets flooded, it can be an issue.

It can be an issue. And it was, definitively. It's a tough dilemma for farmers. If the people like the EA and then people don't get involved and, you know, does our meat, possibly our lamb, got more lead content? You know, it's one of them questions and, you know, is it better you don't know? I'm a reporter. So I obviously can't live with the idea of not knowing about the invisible dangers around

us. But the total contamination in the UK, because of a lack of official testing, we just don't know. But I will say this. If I can get in my car and find evidence of lead in the environment, I can't help but wonder what officials, proper government bodies, would find. Last year, UNICEF and USAID gathered global powers to talk about the dangers of lead poisoning. There's a video of this. You can find it on YouTube. It has some seriously cheesy music under it. But sitting at my desk, I was getting emotional. I listened, rapped.

It's time we move lead exposure from the margins to the mainstream of development. The future is within our... grasp, let's reach for it together. A few months into my reporting, I worried I was overreacting about this whole story. But here were world leaders gathered to focus on lead poisoning. They were talking about it as an imminent threat to children in low and middle income countries. And they were committing to fight it. But from what I'd seen so far, they could have just as likely,

been talking about the UK. I wondered how many children had lead poisoning here. I wondered how many only discovered it once their children's behaviour changed or their gums turned green, like Lily in Wales. I couldn't help but feel an ache in my chest. Why would a fully developed country allow its citizens to be potentially exposed

to a toxic chemical? As I chased the answer, I began getting more tips from all over the UK. From the places I thought were safe. We know about the issue with old mines and runoff, but that's just one of the issues. People don't really feel the threat is real to them. I think it's very easy to think,

well, that just happens to other people. Internally in the house, the lead levels were so dangerously high. We knew it had to be coming from inside the house itself. That's next episode, on Untold. Toxic Legacy. Toxic Legacy is season three of Untold, a Financial Times investigative podcast.

It is produced with Goat Rodeo. The series lead producer is Jay Venables. Our Financial Times audio producer is Purses Love. Reporting by me, Laura Hughes, writing by me and Jay Venables. Story editing from Megan Nadols. Ian Enright, Tofer Forhes, Persis Love,

and Rebecca Susses. Seidel. Executive producer for the Financial Times is Tofa Forhes. Special thanks to Laura Clark. Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nodalski. Mixing, editing and sound design by Jay Venables, Ian Enright and Rebecca Seidel. Editorial and production assistants from Rebecca Seidel, Persis Love, Max Johnston, Ethan Plotkin and Misha Frankel-Douval.

Fact-checking from Laura. Laura Hughes, Jay Venables, Simon Greaves and Lucy Baldwin. If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at laura.huees at Ft.com. Thank you to the many sources who shared their stories with us for this series. For more information and resources talked about in this series, I've left you some links in the show notes. Please check them out. Thanks for listening.