There is a quiet, often invisible kind of damage that doesn’t always make the headlines, but it is happening all around us. It begins with a person scrolling through social media and coming across something that seems plausible—a miracle cure, a frightening warning, a smooth-talking “expert” with no real credentials. It ends with a hospital bed, a delayed diagnosis, a worsening illness, or worse. In the North East of England, this is not an abstract threat or a story about somewhere else. According to new research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, almost one in three people in our region knows someone who has been “seriously harmed” because of a health decision based on misinformation. Let that sink in. Close to a third of us have a personal connection to this problem. We might know a neighbour who delayed seeing a doctor because of something they read online. We might have a family member who caught a preventable disease because they were told vaccines were dangerous. We might have a friend whose symptoms went on far longer than they needed to, simply because they trusted the wrong advice at the wrong time. And in the most serious cases—the ones that don’t get talked about enough—the consequences can be fatal. What makes this statistic even more shocking is that the North East is being hit harder than almost anywhere else in Britain. Compared with people living in the South East or the East Midlands, we are nearly twice as likely to know someone who has been harmed by health misinformation. This isn’t a distant problem happening to strangers in some other part of the country. It is happening in our homes, in our families, and in our communities, and it is happening at a scale that should alarm all of us.
What makes this report so important is that it refuses to treat Britain as one great, uniform mass. We often talk about “national crises” and “nationwide challenges”, but health misinformation is not experienced equally across the country. The national picture is concerning enough—previous analysis found that around one fifth of UK adults say they know someone who has suffered serious harm as a result of health misinformation. But the regional breakdown shows that the problem is far more concentrated in some places than others. People living in the North East are not just seeing a little more misinformation than those in the South East; they are seeing and feeling the consequences almost twice as much. The authors of the report, led by Prof Liam Smeeth, the director of LSHTM, want to understand exactly why this is. “Our previous analysis found that a fifth of UK adults say they know someone who has suffered serious harm as a result of health misinformation,” Smeeth said. “What this new analysis suggests is that even those living in neighbouring regions of England could be experiencing very different levels of harm from misinformation or have very different experiences while attempting to judge the accuracy of health claims or find reliable health information.” That is a crucial point. It means that the factors behind this harm are not simply individual—they are connected to place, community, access to services, digital habits, and social networks. A campaign designed in London, aimed at the whole country, might completely miss the particular pressures and needs of people in the North East. The experts behind this research are openly saying that responses have to be local as well as national. To protect people properly, we need to understand what is happening on the ground, in our own communities, and then build support that meets people where they are.
The harm caused by health misinformation is not always dramatic, but it is always serious. According to the LSHTM researchers, examples of serious harm include someone becoming ill with a preventable disease, delays in getting treatment, or a person suffering with symptoms for much longer than necessary. These are not just medical failures; they are human tragedies that ripple outward. When one person gets sick because of misinformation, their partner, their children, their friends, and their colleagues are affected too. They worry, they take time off work, they carry extra burdens. And when health services are already stretched, treating avoidable harm puts even more pressure on hospitals and GPs. The report makes it clear that this is not just an individual problem but a public health crisis that demands action at both local and national level. And there is a clear signal that the public wants that action. The national research found that over half of UK adults—54%—put “educating the public on how to identify false or misleading health information” in their top three priorities. That is more than a simple majority. It tells us that most people already sense the danger, and they want help navigating the confusing flood of information that surrounds them every day. They want to know what is true. They want to be able to protect themselves and their families. The report calls for much more to be done, and LSHTM is now inviting health authorities in the North East to collaborate with its Health Information Integrity Network, a new initiative designed to bring researchers, health bodies, and communities together. It is a hopeful step, because it recognises that the people closest to the problem are often the best placed to solve it.
There are already people and organisations in the North East working to turn that hope into practical help. One of them is She Thrives NE, a network founded by Barbora Gray, with the mission of ensuring that women, in particular, are able to access evidence-based health information. The network is a response to the realisation that misinformation does not affect everyone equally, and that women are often targeted by unregulated wellness influencers, miracle cures, and pseudoscientific advice. Gray has been outspoken about the need to support qualified professionals who are using their voices online for good. Last month, she made a powerful point that should be heard across the country: “Qualified healthcare professionals who are sharing evidence-based information online should be actively supported and encouraged to do more of it—with structured backing, resources and time from health communication teams, not just goodwill and their own free hours.” That is such an important issue. Many doctors, nurses, and other health professionals are already trying to push back against misinformation in their spare time, in the evenings, after long shifts. They are doing it because they care, but caring isn’t enough. They need proper support, funding, and encouragement from the organisations they work for. Gray also stressed that there are two sides to this fight. It’s not just about lifting up the right voices; it’s also about stopping the wrong ones. “We need much stronger regulation to stop unqualified individuals presenting themselves as health authorities online,” she said. “The consequences of poor or false health information can be fatal in the most serious cases, and right now there’s very little stopping anyone from posturing as an expert. Encouragement for the right voices has to go hand in hand with real accountability for the wrong ones.” That balance is essential. If all we do is preach to the converted, the problem will continue. We need to make it harder for dangerous misinformation to spread in the first place.
Part of the problem is that public health organisations have been slow to adapt to the way people actually live their lives. Most of us do not read official reports or sit down with a carousel of text posted by a health agency. We scroll through our phones quickly, testing posts for a second or two, and deciding instantly whether something is worth our attention. In that tiny window, a warm human face talking directly to the camera will always be more powerful than a block of corporate text. This is the argument made so clearly by Dr Lillie Parker, a paediatrician with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. Speaking at the UK Health Security Agency Conference in Manchester, she said: “I think public health needs to realise, that for better or worse, humans are craving human interaction. A carousel post of text coming from an organisation is not what the public are going to engage in. In that 1.8 seconds they are going to scroll past, they will not be reading what you have to say.” Her words strike at the heart of the challenge. The people who are best trained to communicate health advice—doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals—are often cautious about putting themselves out there online. There is a fear, an anxiety, about the backlash, the scrutiny, or the professional risks of being publicly visible. But Parker argues that organisations need to embrace these human voices. In communities where health visitors and GPs are being reduced, there is a gap that smartphones can fill. “Everyone has a smartphone, and those people can reach people on their smartphone,” she said. “Lots of doctors are focused in communication. We are trained in how to talk to the public, how to get messages across, but there is an anxiety around those people being on social media.” There are small signs that this message is starting to sink in. NHS England launched an account on TikTok during the summer, a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It came after a warning from national medical director Professor Frankie Swords that people are turning to “unreliable” sources for health information. But if the NHS is serious about reaching people, it will need more than a single national account. It will need to support thousands of health professionals to share their knowledge locally, authentically, and with a human touch.
So where does this leave us in the North East? The statistics are sobering, but they are not a reason for despair. They are a reason to act. The regional variation identified by the LSHTM report is a reminder that national strategies on their own will never be enough. We need local solutions, shaped by local people, that reflect the particular challenges and strengths of our area. We already have some of the right ingredients: a strong sense of community, dedicated health professionals, and local initiatives like She Thrives NE that are doing the hard, patient work of rebuilding trust in evidence-based information. The next step is to connect these efforts more firmly with national resources and research. LSHTM is inviting health authorities in the North East to take part in its Health Information Integrity Network, and that is an opportunity that should be seized. By working together, researchers and communities can uncover the deeper reasons behind the North East’s vulnerability to misinformation. They can develop better tools, better messages, and better support systems. They can also push for stronger regulation of online content, ensuring that unqualified people cannot simply present themselves as medical experts without any consequences. This is about protecting our health, but it is also about protecting our most basic right to know the truth. None of us should have to become a medical detective every time we look something up online. We should be able to trust that the information we find is reliable. Until that trust is rebuilt, the human cost of misinformation will continue to grow. But there is hope. The public is already asking for better education on how to spot misinformation. Health professionals are already willing to raise their voices. And communities in the North East have already shown that they can come together when it matters. The truth should be the easiest thing to find, not the hardest. If we use this moment to act—locally, nationally, and individually—we can make sure that fewer families in our region ever have to say, “I wish we had known the truth.” Let’s make that change happen, before another person we love gets hurt.