Drinking water map shows where toxic ‘forever chemicals' are found in the UK
Researchers from York University found trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) in 98% of locations in 32 rivers in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
TFA is one of a family of more than 14,000 man-made chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs), which have been used since the 1940s in everything from waterproof clothing to non-stick frying pans, as well as cosmetics and food packaging.
The chemicals can accumulate in people's bodies (as well as in the water we drink) and can lead to serious health issues including cancer, liver damage and harm to unborn children.
The UK government launched an inquiry this year into the issue - but campaigners say not enough is being done.
Natalie Sims, from the Royal Society of Chemistry, told Yahoo News: 'There is more that could be being done, and that is why we are calling for action.'
The Royal Society of Chemistry has mapped levels of the chemicals in Britain's drinking waters, and is calling for the public to take action to raise the issue.
'The public can be really powerful, and I think we have seen that when we look at tackling sewage overflows, that's really been pushed up the government agenda, because the public is also pushing for it," Sims says.
'That's why we really want to take action now, and that's why there's been much more push for it from organisations like ourselves or others. In addition to developing alternative materials, we urgently need stronger, more robust controls to prevent further pollution and reduce our exposure to harmful substances in the environment.'
PFAs are a group of thousands of chemicals that don't occur in nature and are extremely hard to get rid of. They also also toxic, even in small quantities.
They have been used in manufacturing and consumer products since the 1940s.
'We've used them so extensively, really since the 1940s they found our way in so many different consumer products," Sims explains. "For example, in your waterproof coat, anything waterproofing, school children's clothing, anything stain resistant. PFAs have some desirable properties, and are so good at what they do in terms of that heat resistance, that water and oil resistance, stain resistance, durability, often a lot of the things that makes it very useful in products.
'Because they're so persistent, they obviously found their way into the environment, into our food, into our water.
They are also used in jet engines, medical devices, refrigeration systems, the construction industry and electrical devices.
In the environment, they can last for extremely long periods: hundreds or even thousands of years.
They also accumulate in human bodies.
'Forever chemicals' have been phased out of some consumer products - but are still used in products such as non-stick frying pans and some packaging, although manufacturers tend to be reluctant to say exactly where they are used.
The dangers attached to PFAs often comes when they are used industrially, or when products containing PFAs are disposed of inadequately, meaning they enter the water supply.
In the UK, PFAs are most likely to be found in water near industrial sites including airports and areas that produce products which use PFAs.
The Royal Society of Chemistry warns that contamination is likely near landfill sites where liquid contaminated with PFAs can leak out of the site, or near incinerators which often are not hot enough to fully burn PFAs.
The chemicals can also be found near where firefighting foam is routinely used, including airports, military sites and fire-training areas.
Some airports, including Heathrow, have already switched to using foam which does not contain PFAs.
Wastewater sites can also leech PFAs into the water.
The chemicals have been linked to serious health issues including liver damage, some cancers and harm to unborn children, thyroid disease and fertility issues.
Large-scale studies have shown that PFAs in drinking water correlates with increased levels of cancer in multiple parts of the body.
A review in the journal eBioMedicine linked PFAs exposure to decreased efficiency in vaccines, premature birth, increased severity of COVID-19, along with cancer, reduced immune function and developmental delays in children.
Water companies in England and Wales must monitor and regulate 48 types of PFAs, despite there being thousands of varieties, with many remaining untested.
But this Drinking Water Inspectorate ruling actually goes further than EU legislation.
Individual PFAs concentrations in drinking water cannot exceed 100 nanograms per litre (ng/L).
This is 10 times higher than the Drinking Water Inspectorate's own 'low risk' threshold of 10 ng/L.
In the US, there are limits of 4 ng/L for each of PFOS and PFOA, two of the most common PFAs, and the EU states that 20 widespread PFAs must collectively not exceed 100 ng/L.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has called for new limits on the amounts of PFAs permissible in drinking water.
Specifically the RSC has called for a new limit of 10 ng/L for individual PFAs.
The RSC has also called for stricter controls over the sources of PFAs including in industrial discharges, with a national chemicals regulator to monitor and regulate discharges.
Sims says: 'An RSC survey of more than 4,000 UK adults, carried out by YouGov in August showed nine in ten Britons believe it's 'very important' to keep PFAS out of our food, water and environment. The public do want action on this, which I think is really powerful when it comes to speaking to the government.
'In terms of industry, having them push to develop alternatives, because they've had these chemicals that they've been allowed to use for so long, in terms of because they're so good at what they do, it's trying to transition that away into more, safer and sort of sustainable alternatives.
Sims says that it's also vital that British people have a clearer picture of the chemicals in the water they drink.
She says: 'PFAS are contained in many products and ingredients that are made or imported to the UK for use across many industries. However, we do not have a full picture of how PFAS enter and move within the supply chain.
'It's likely that the exposure you have on the everyday is going to be quite low, but it's that long term build up where, for one thing, it can be really challenging to pinpoint where those adverse effects could come from.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born
What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century. 'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.' There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. The experiences of Moggach, an English graduate of Bristol University who was brought up by a literary family in London, are different to those of a coal miner's daughter in Durham – or indeed those of King Charles or Ozzy Osbourne. Not only has no reputable study officially anointed the 1948-ers as the most fortunate cohort in history, a poll commissioned to generate publicity for Call the Midwife, a television show set in the mid-1950s, concluded – unconvincingly and unsurprisingly – that 1956 was actually the best year to be born. The Telegraph dived into the data and the experiences of the 1948 generation – from healthcare to housing, education to employment, music to social mobility – to test the theory. The 1948-ers were the first babies delivered by the National Health Service. 'If you were born that year, you benefited from a well-funded NHS throughout your life,' says Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at think tank Nuffield Trust. They also benefitted, he argues, from the rapid improvement in healthcare since 1890, a period that established the basics of modern medicine, from widespread vaccinations to blood transfusions. And although infant mortality rates in 1948 were nearly 10 times higher than today, maternity care had also made significant improvements during the first half of the 20th century. As soon as the 1948-ers were safely home from hospital – and as long as they avoided the worst of polio and tuberculosis – the Family Allowances Act of 1945 provided a universal benefit of five shillings per week per child. Few children born in 1948 would have strong memories of rationing, which finally ended in 1954. None would have been old enough to take part in National Service, which stopped in 1960. Meanwhile, many of their parents were enjoying the fastest rises in living standards in modern history. Amid low inflation, men's wages almost doubled between 1951 and 1961, despite working two fewer hours per week over the decade (42 vs 44). Families were increasingly lavish with this disposable income and leisure time. Car ownership rose by 25 per cent between 1957 and 1959, television ownership by 32 per cent. Sixty thousand people per week took a holiday at Butlins, while foreign holidays doubled in the 1950s (and doubled again the following decade). This rising consumption, coupled with generous tax cuts, famously led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957: 'Most of our people have never had it so good.' The 1948-ers' parents seemed to agree, returning 'Supermac' with a majority of 100 seats in the general election of 1959. A cartoon in the Spectator pictured the prime minister surrounded by televisions and washing machines with the caption: 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.' This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music. 'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.' According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.' The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.' So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.' Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952. Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'. 'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market. 'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.' A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4). The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014. According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers. 'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.' The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East. 'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 'If you were a working-class man, especially in an area of the country reliant on manufacturing, things could have been tough for quite a long time.' For many, however, the 1980s were marked by huge growths in personal wealth and cushioned by a continuing period of extraordinary rises in house prices. If a 1948-er had bought their first property in 1970, they would have paid an average price of £3,611, taking their first step on the ladder just in time for annual price increases to hit double digits for the first time in 1971 and then rise by 50 per cent in 1973. Later generations missed this boom: property prices increased by more than three-fold in the 1970s, compared to not even doubling in the 1980s. If you bought in 1990, your property probably wouldn't recover its value until 1996. As long as their household finances could withstand the high inflation and interest rates of the 1970s, the property of an average 1948-er homeowner buying in 1970 would increase 65-fold by 2025. In London and the South East, those figures were even more eye-watering. 'My great-aunt died in the late 1960s and left me and my three sisters a house just off the Fulham Road,' says Moggach. 'We sold it for £12,000, divided up that money between us and I got on the property ladder. God knows what that house would be worth now [probably £3-£4 million]. We all just sat on our behinds and made thousands and thousands of pounds a year – it was insane.' Many 1948-ers certainly seem to have enjoyed a blessed life in the Goldilocks zone of wealth, health, personal liberty and state support from cradle to grave. But is 2025 a good time to be 77 years old? Again, of course, it depends. Moggach feels terribly guilty about her good fortune and the prospect of being a burden on the NHS. 'Everyone I know is having scans and illnesses and tripping over and having new knees. I don't think it's a good time to be frail in any way. The state can't scoop you up, partly because people my age, who had it so easy, are now a drain on the state. I'm amazed that a younger generation hasn't risen up and breached the barricades.' According to Mark Dayan from the Nuffield Trust, the NHS is actually better in some ways today than it was a decade ago, 'but access to care is getting worse and the state of social care is very bad'. Not that this appears to be causing undue alarm for many 1948-ers. A report from the Office of National Statistics in April revealed that those aged over 70 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms than any other age group. Its other findings, which presumably enjoy a degree of correlation, include that they are more likely to trust other people, eat healthily, spend time outdoors and feel a sense of belonging in their community. The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Fox News
3 hours ago
- Fox News
Can drinking soda help migraines? Doctors reveal whether bubbly drinks cure headaches or not
For the 39 million Americans who suffer from migraines, finding effective relief can be a constant struggle – leading many to test out old wives' tales. Some claim that applying potato slices to the forehead helps kill the complex headaches, while others submerge their feet in hot water in a desperate search for relief. Another remedy? Sipping soda, particularly Coke, is said to cure migraines. But does it really work? Dr. Kay Kennis, a general practitioner in England and a trustee for the Migraine Trust, pointed out that caffeine is the main substance in sodas that may help some migraine sufferers. "The caffeine in Coke can act as a nerve disruptor, [as] a substance that affects nerve activity," the expert told Fox News Digital. "For some, that disturbance works in a positive way." Kennis added, "There are some painkillers that people take for migraine that have caffeine - and some do respond well to that - but we don't fully know why." Caffeine can be a trigger for migraines as well, said the doctor, who advised that too much caffeine consumption can cause "a worse situation in the long run." Blake Livingood, a doctor of natural medicine (DC) based in North Carolina, also noted the impact of caffeine during an interview with Fox News Digital. Caffeine can impact blood flow to the brain, he said, which may provide relief. "Caffeine can constrict blood vessels and change blood flow to the brain, which might help if your headache is related to dilation of those vessels," he said. "But the idea that soda actually cures or prevents migraines - no, it doesn't." "Watermelon can give you good electrolytes and improve blood flow, especially if you sprinkle a little salt on it, which also happens to taste great." Livingood also acknowledged the viral "McMigraine" remedy that claims sipping Coke and eating McDonald's fries is an effective solution. "If you look at those ingredients - salt, caffeine, and sugar - they can have an impact on blood flow to the head," he said. "That's partly why grabbing fries with your soda sometimes seems to help. The salt in the fries, the sugar and the caffeine combined can change circulation and electrolytes." But he said there are much healthier ways to get those benefits, ranging from fruit to nuts to organic coffee. "Organic coffee is a better caffeine source," Livingood recommended. "Watermelon can give you good electrolytes and improve blood flow, especially if you sprinkle a little salt on it, which also happens to taste great." The health expert has also seen success in using magnesium to prevent migraines. He said electrolytes and sodium are key components in prevention and recovery as well, in addition to potassium. Livingood also advised migraine sufferers to try mined salt and sea salt instead of regular table salt. "Any form of salt can impact blood flow and electrolytes, but there are better sources," he said. "Sprinkling good-quality salt on watermelon or nuts or even adding a pinch to your water is a healthier way to get those minerals." Norbert Heuser, an entpreneur and author of the book "Coffee Addiction & Caffeinism," also told Fox News Digital he doesn't recommend relying on sugary beverages for migraine relief. "Migraines are complex and often tied to inflammation, dehydration, toxins like heavy metals and chemicals, or even environmental stressors such as EMF [electromagnetic radiation] from cell phones, WiFi and other sources," the health and wellness advocate said. Heuser added, "The high sugar content and artificial additives in sodas and energy drinks can actually make these underlying issues worse over time. It's a quick fix that ignores the root causes – and may even fuel them."
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Starmer thanks nurse who helped his brother to mark NHS anniversary
Sir Keir Starmer has paid tribute to an NHS advanced nurse practitioner who cared for his brother, Nick, in the final weeks before his death. Nick died from cancer on Boxing Day 2024, aged 60. In a video marking the NHS's 77th anniversary, the Prime Minister said Ben Huntley ensured his brother "felt cared for and respected". In the clip, Sir Keir is shown speaking to Mr Huntley in Downing Street, while other members of the public also meet with NHS staff who helped them. The Prime Minister said: 'My mum worked in the NHS and then she was very, very ill, for most of her life. And the NHS became our absolute lifeline. The NHS has always been there for my family. Today, on its 77th anniversary, the entire country says thank you. — Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 5, 2025 'My sister worked for the NHS, my wife works for the NHS, and it was the NHS that looked after my brother who we lost last Boxing Day to cancer. 'Ben, you looked after him. I think from the moment he was in all the way through, and you made sure that he felt cared for and respected.' The PM later added: 'That meant a huge amount to me and my family and, on all of our behalves, I say through you a very special thank you to the NHS.' Earlier this week, Sir Keir told the BBC's Political Thinking that he 'made it my business to be there in the hospital' when his brother was told about his diagnosis 'so that I could begin to help look after him'. 'It's really hard to lose your brother to cancer, he was a very vulnerable man,' the Prime Minister said. He shared details of 'going up in the porter's lift into the back of the intensive care unit' and wanting to protect his brother's privacy. He told the same interview that US President Donald Trump asked about his brother in a call a 'few days' after he died.
