Untold: Opus Dei - Toxic Legacy, Ep. 3: The Whisper and Scream

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

A toddler in Leeds died from lead poisoning. Laura Hughes speaks to doctors in the UK to learn what must be done to prevent it from happening again. She learns that truly addressing the problem will be a massive undertaking. It would require a complete overhaul of the housing, environmental and food standards systems. But first, we need to find out where the lead is. Learn more about Untold: Toxic Legacy.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.

It's 2015. A two-year-old boy starts suffering from sudden seizures. He's brought to his local hospital in Leeds. The team of doctors treating him begin running tests to find out what's wrong. They discover his brain is swelling. They think it could be meningitis or a brain infection. But in fact, it's severe lead poisoning. Hardly anybody was aware of what lead poisoning looks like. like most pediatricians didn't even know that this could be something that could present like this and including me.

That was probably the first case of lead poisoning that had seen in my entire carrier so far. The doctors intubate the toddler and put him on a ventilator, but the boy's brain is non-responsive. He had severe lead poisoning, which actually caused his brain to shut down. It's too late, and the boy dies. There was an extreme level of lead in the toddler's. blood. The build-up was more than double the amount of lead, thought to be fatal. You just feel, you always feel that our wish I could have done something more, and if I'd known about this, I could have picked something else. But I'm quite conscious

of the fact that, you know, we're not perfect. We won't know everything that is happening. We might not always pick up things on time. After the boy's death, it was Dr. Avanish-Tantri's job to investigate how he died. if there was more the hospital could have done. But the reality was crushing. By the time the child had come to the hospital, it was already too late. The boy had been going to his local GP, but his lead poisoning was never picked up on.

And because his doctor didn't catch the lead poisoning, the family didn't know to remove the source of their son's exposure. By the time he arrived in the hospital, the poisonous metal had been accumulating in his body for months. So what we could actually do to prevent this from happening? How do we pick this up earlier? We had to find some way of picking this up while this child was being seen by the GP in primary care.

Dr Tantry was determined to raise awareness of blood poisoning across the medical community in Leeds. What he came up with, well, it might be the first key to unlocking how many children are out there, steadily, silently, absorbing lead across the United Kingdom. For the Financial Times, this is untold.

Toxic Legacy. Episode 3. The Whisper and Scream. We're from the FT, for the Financial Times, and we're meant to be seeing... Oh, Dr. Jason? Yes. I'm knocking on doors again. This time, I'm at a local GP surgery, right in the centre of Leeds.

Date of birth, please. And your name, please? This is a normal family practice. On a Wednesday morning, the waiting room is full of patients. Hello. Hello. Hello. Laura.

Hello. Hello. How are you doing? Dr. Hesantha Gaias Singh is a general practitioner in Leeds. He's been at this practice for two decades. Now, this is not a particularly special practice. No offence, Dr. Geyasing. It's your normal, run-of-the-mill GPs.

But I'm here because I'm here because, for the past few years, this doctor has been diagnosing more and more children with lead poisoning. The interesting thing is that I am picking them up because my doctory friends, they're not even testing for lead. I asked Dr. Gai Singh what he sees in his practice. Initially, what people turn up with isn't like I think my kid's got lead poisoning. In Dr. Gai Singh's experience, instead, parents show up with children displaying vague symptoms, like fatigue and stomach pain. When he hears that, he knows he needs to check the child's blood for deficiencies.

So he'll go to order a blood test. Well, we need to check their iron levels. As Dr. Gai Singh orders the blood test for iron, his system interrupts him with a pop-up alert. It prompts him to ask the parents whether their child has a history. of eating unusual things. And if he checks, yes, they do. The system automatically includes lead levels in the blood test.

All children are the same. They're curious. They're exploring the world with their fingers, with their mouth. They've put things in their mouth. And if their world has lead in it, they will find themselves ingesting it, potentially. The brilliance of the pop-up alert is that it brings lead into the complex.

conversation. It prompts doctors to test for it. And if they do find lead in a child's blood, Dr. Gai Singh and the parents can actually do something about it, starting with finding and removing the source of lead exposure. Every child that I've picked on by, we fix their lead levels. You just have to know about it. The very reason this pop-up alert exists in Leeds is because of the toddler you heard about at the beginning of this episode. When Dr. Tantry was at work investigating the boy's death, he discovered the boy had been eating unusual things. We realised that the way he got lead poisoning was from licking and eating paint and he was

absorbing lead all the time because of that. So I was then thinking, okay, how do we alert clinicians that are looking after these children in the community to pick up these things? Dr Tantry developed the pop-up alert with the help of the hospital's biochemists and IT department. In 2016, it was rolled out across the medical community in Leeds, in GP surgeries in the area, like the one Dr. Gaias Singh works at. To change the system, Dr. Tantri needed buy-in from the professionals who this would fall to, the people actually testing blood. And he got it. What he started to find was that the doctors actively testing for lead and children,

the ones using his pop-up alert, were reporting more and more cases. In the first year alone, after we introduced that particular mechanism and that particular test, we identified another 12 cases of lead poisoning in primary care, and prior to that, we had none. In America, children are routinely screened for lead exposure, starting at a young age. and they've been doing this for over three decades. We have nothing like this here in the UK. What we do have is an annual report

that records severe lead poisoning cases. It's a small number and nearly all of them are coming from one part of the country. Yorkshire and the Humber. That's where Leeds is. It's not that Leeds has more sources of lead exposure than anywhere else. In fact, far from it.

It's that Leeds is the only place in the UK where lead poisoning is being picked up in a systematic routine way by Dr Tantri's pop-up alert. If this system was rolled out across all GPs in the UK, how many more cases would we be picking up every year? Because we are actively looking for it, we're identifying more. I suspect there's a lot of lead poisoning in the country

that is just running under the radar and not being picked up. Dr. Tantri's system is solid. But it's niche. It wouldn't have caught so many of the other cases of lead poisoning I've seen through my reporting. What about the children breathing in the lead dust from a home renovation?

The ones eating poison eggs contaminated by a nearby old lead mine? or the children drinking contaminated tap water. These cases are slipping under the radar. That is something always in the back of my mind that there are probably more cases out there that we're not identifying. Our government can't tell me

how many children might have lead poisoning or have been exposed to lead, even at low levels. And since we don't know, we don't know how many of our children might be experiencing behavioral issues, as a result. And if lead poisoning is causing those behavioural issues,

we don't know the extent of the pressure it's creating in school classrooms. We don't know the strain lead is putting on our overwhelmed health service. Instead of widespread testing and finding answers to these unknowns, the UK government appears to follow an unusual logic. In 2018, the UK government's screening committee decided against conducting nationwide testing of lead levels in children. Because, and I quote, the number of children affected in the UK is currently not known.

At the beginning of this series, I said looking into lead wasn't really my day job. I cover health and education policy. But I know now that this issue couldn't be more relevant to my normal beat. In May 2024, members of Parliament held a meeting to discuss environmental lead pollution in Wales. Off the back of a series of stories the FTA wrote last year, I was genuinely excited.

It was a select committee hearing, made up of elected officials, members of Parliament, of all political backgrounds. In these meetings, they invite witnesses to present evidence on whether or not the government is doing its job on a certain issue.

And then they make a series of recommendations. As far as I could tell, I was the only member of the press sitting in the room that day. Good morning, Borodar, welcome to this session of the Welsh Affairs Committee, where we're looking today at the extent of metal mine pollution in Wales and what is being done, what should be done to address the impacts of metal mine pollution. This MP is at the head of the table. He's the chair of the committee. He'll help guide the discussion and keep the meeting

on track. When he calls it to a start, there are two familiar faces sitting at the table in the centre. I was over the moon that the MPs had called them to give evidence. Thank you. I'm Bordadar, Professor Maclean and Dr Sautorius. It's great to have you here. Dr Mark Maclin and Dr. Andrea Satoris, the experts conducting all of those tests and studies in Wales. They are ready to serve as witnesses to today's issue. In this meeting, They are responsible for representing the entire problem of environmental lead contamination. They have to convince the MPs of the dangers of lead, and that not enough was being done about it.

And they only have half an hour to make their case. I think sharing the message, first of all, just needs to be done. A lot of the people that I spoke to just were not informed. They didn't know. They would only figure out that there were issues when their animals started dying. but before that they weren't informed. I've been working on this for close to 40 years, and I find it very frustrating that our research has been taken up

and used in many other parts of the world. I think it's probably time it was used in a routine way. And what me and Andrew have been sketching out is there are very practical steps. There needs some work to be done. I had expected some skepticism from the MPs. I studied their faces as Mark and Andrea gave their statements. But to my delight, the elected officials were taking the issue seriously.

They were listening closely to the experts. They wanted to protect people and were starting to understand how difficult that might be when it came to the scale of lead pollution. One MP asks point blank, is it too late to solve the problem? I just want to be quite blunt, really. You said abandoned metal mines have been polluting surrounding areas for decades. And my question really is, is it too late to focus on the remediation of the actual sites themselves? In terms of the mine sites themselves, as I suggest, we need to sort of turn off the tap.

Mark says it's not too late. Damage has been done. we still need to do something about it now. We need to turn off the tap. If you remember Mark's maps from the first episode, the importance of the water channels, he explains to the committee that we need to think beyond the mine sites themselves,

to the areas around the sites where people live and farm, which could be contaminated. If you were someone who cared about stopping lead exposure, At this point in the meeting, you might feel like it's going really well. But I was anxious. I know how these meetings go. And anticipating the next round of the meeting, this is usually where things start to turn. Because this next part is when we hear from the people who should be doing something about it.

The chair calls a recess. Mark and Andrea are dismissed and take seats in the audience next to me. When we return, a new set of witnesses sit down in front of the committee. They're the regulators, the people responsible for the lead mines. And something in the air changes. Welcome back to part two of this section of the Welsh Affairs Committee, where we're looking at the extent of pollution from abandoned metal mines in Wales. For this second panel, we are joined by natural...

The regulators represent Natural Resource Wales and the Coal Authority. They are in charge of the Welsh environment and mining legacy issues across the UK, respectively. If anyone was going to clean up the issue of lead contamination in Wales, it would be these guys. The committee starts asking them questions, based on the academics' testimony. They asked the regulators about the extent of the issue and what was being done. I knew what they would say. It's what they told me when I came asking. Work was undertaken there in 2003.

It's got a discrete all-body which sits above the landscape and the mine were being damned at the lowest drainage level into a different catchment. So from a coal point of view, there are 16 marm water treatment schemes in Wales and I can give some more facts on those. Getting from the starting point of knowing nothing about a site to remediation is always going to be in the region of four to seven years. So we have that capacity issue. We've currently got an MOU with National Resource as well,

which we signed five years ago. One of the MPs, Beth Winter, removed her glasses and gestures to the bureaucrats at the table. Listening to the professor, there is extensive international research providing all the evidences required, as well as recommendations of what actions needed. So listening to you just now, I'm a bit perplexed really as to why we are where we are, when the evidence is...

She gestures to Mark and Andrea. The evidence is clearly there. It's natural resource Wales who answers. Our focus, again, water quality, and the sources of the water quality impacts in the rivers, which is our focus, which is the remit we've been given by Welsh Government, are the mine sites. Seated next to me, Mark shakes. takes his head. He's listening closely and sighing in disappointment. He looks towards Beth, almost smiling. To Mark, this encapsulates everything his work has pushed up against

for the past 40 years, and it's frustrating. Natural Resource Wales are defending the territory they've been assigned to cover by the Welsh government, and that territory, they say it's specifically the mine sites, not the problem of lead contamination beyond the sites, where people are living and farming. Is your emphasis because of where your remit lies and not based on what the evidence shows is required? Are we being blinkered in terms of what our strategy responsibilities are in terms of our agencies, whereas we need to look at it differently? Our remit is that water quality. You're caveating that very carefully, both of you,

are saying within our role, within our scope, is that a suggestion that actually, if your scope was different, you might concentrate resources differently, but you're working within the terms that you've been given. We're funded and worked with national resources as well by Welsh government on a specific element of the programme,

and that is our role. That's their remit, their role, the part they are legally responsible for. It's government siloing, and even the MPs who represent the government are frustrated by it. In the span of this two-hour-long committee hearing, the words lead poisoning, people and human impact are mentioned only a handful of times, and only by the academics, all the MPs. Throughout this hearing, I take furious notes on my phone. Nobody is saying the academics are wrong, but no one is saying they're the ones who can solve it.

We've heard extensively about the legal responsibility here. But who is morally responsible? It's a question one of the MPs poses to the regulators. In 15 years' time, is there going to be a headline which says there's a huge public health scandal due to contamination from abandoned Welsh mines? And we knew about it 15 years ago. You're the people who are closest to this.

You're the people have written the reports. You've heard the academics. You're doing the works. Is there anything that we're missing? Is there a lack of political will? Is there like a funding? Is there something we're missing? Is there going to be a big problem two decades down the road?

Really good question. So at the moment, our forecast is based on the funding we currently receive from Welsh government, which is the constrained factor. You're doing what you can with what you have right now. But there's nothing, there's no glaring omission or really, big worry at the back of your mind, which you're thinking, we just... There is no silver bullet to this. This needs investment.

This needs better regulation. This needs collaboration and integration across all parties and working with our delivery partners to move this forward. It comes out that barely any of the mine sites across Wales have actually been cleaned up, including the sites that these regulatory bodies say they have remediated and point to as success stories. The MPs get them to admit that even those mine sites are still polluting, leaking tons of contamination.

But just as we start to get somewhere, we run out of time. Okay. I mean, we were speaking a moment ago about silos. We've talked about resource constraints. We've talked about the different drivers of policy. I mean, you'd forgive us if we came to the conclusion that the whole setup just isn't fit for purpose for dealing with this problem and the scale of it, right? The hearing flew by.

The MPs covered a lot of ground. They asked probing questions that I myself wanted answers to. Hearing from the regulators themselves made it clear. Our system is not set up to deal with this problem. So only a day after the hearing, the MPs wrote to the Welsh government with an urgent warning on the risks of lead contamination and their recommendations to avoid what they deemed an environmental and public health scandal,

starting with expanding the regulator's responsibility. But the real impact of the hearing, the Welsh government's effort to solve this problem, remains to be seen. Right, what are we going to go find? Eggs. How do you like to eat your eggs? Scrambled eggs. Who makes the best eggs? Mommy.

Do I? She's blatantly not too. I think Daddy makes that her eggs amazing. Yeah, you do it. Really? Yeah. Okay. The thing about lead is that it doesn't go away.

You can't see it and you can't smell it. You can't even taste it. But it's in our soil, in water, in food, in our housing. Let me hold that and you can have a look. As my children and I collect eggs from my neighbour's children, chickens, I can't stop thinking about the other families and farmers unknowingly collecting eggs that might be poisoned. What do you got?

Two eggs. Why? Do you want to get the pot? Yeah. A recent report by UNICEF, estimated around 213,000 children in the UK, are living with lead poisoning today. It's just an estimate. But it should be enough to make us wonder what the true number is.

I've travelled the country, speaking to people whose lives have been turned upside down by lead poisoning. I've seen evidence of the impact of lead on families everywhere I've been. And I know my reporting has only just scratched the surface. I imagine this silent epidemic, spreading across towns and cities, I can't help but wonder, have I discovered something that could be in part responsible for other problems we are dealing with as a society? Exposure to lead affects every part of our bodies. We know it causes so many health issues. That affects how we learn, how we feel and how we act.

Exposure can strip a child of their full potential. It can even lead to death. Officially, we stopped using lead decades ago. But the lead we once used, we forgot about it. And it's still with us. We're living with it. We didn't entirely deal with the problem of lead. We neglected to clear up the mess we'd left.

And now, a new generation is inheriting it. That might be it. That is a lot of eggs. What color are they? Pink and green. Wow. Okay, let's have to don't drop them and let's just put them in the... It's here. There's one more. Is there one more? 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 Persis Love, reporting by me, Laura Hughes. Writing by me and Jay Venables. Story editing from Megan Nadolsky, Ian Enright, Tofer Forges, Persis Love and Rebecca Seidel. Executive producer for the Financial Times is Tofer Forges. Special thanks to Laura Clark. Executive producers for Goatheur, are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolsky. 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 Duval. Fact-checking from Laura Hughes, Jay Venables, Simon Greaves and Lucy Baldwin. Special thanks to Nigel Hansen, Michael Lello and James Sandy. If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at laura. 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.