Imagine scrolling through your phone late at night and seeing a post that claims a certain supplement can cure arthritis, or that a vaccine is far more dangerous than the disease it prevents. It might look convincing, come from a friend or an influencer, and arrive with no warning label attached. New research from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) suggests that many people in the UK do not just scroll past such content—they act on it, and later wish they had not. The report, titled Health Misinformation: Public Perceptions of Threat to the UK, was launched today and is based on a survey of 2,110 UK adults conducted by Survation on 9–10 September 2026. It paints a vivid picture of a country swimming in dubious health advice. The headline figure is stark: one in five UK adults say they have made a health decision based on false or misleading information that they later regretted, and among adults under 34 that figure rises to one in three. Even more unsettlingly, more than a third of 18–24-year-olds say they personally know someone who has suffered serious harm because of such a decision—catching a preventable disease, putting off medical treatment, or living with symptoms for longer than necessary. These are not abstract worries. They are lived experiences, happening in ordinary families, among young people who are supposed to be the most digitally savvy generation.
Perhaps the most human part of the survey is not the statistic about personal regret, but the worry that spreads outward to the people we love. Half of all adults in the UK—49%—say they are concerned that a family member could be harmed by a health decision made on the basis of false or misleading information. That worry is not unfounded. Four in ten respondents (42%) said they worry about relatives sharing health claims without first checking whether they are accurate. There is also a quiet admission of vulnerability: nearly one in five people (19%) said they are not very confident, or not confident at all, when it comes to deciding whether a health claim is true. This is a dangerous combination—people who feel unsure about what to believe, surrounded by a sea of confident-sounding misinformation and family members who pass it on out of love or concern. The examples of serious harm in the report make the stakes concrete: someone contracts a preventable infection because they believed a false story about vaccines; someone delays seeing a doctor because they listened to a post that told them their symptoms were nothing to worry about; someone endures months of unnecessary pain because they trusted a dietary supplement advertised online. These are not fringe cases or isolated anecdotes. They are the kind of outcomes that happen when health information is treated like entertainment, and sharing becomes more natural than checking. Every one of those numbers represents a person who woke up the next day, or weeks later, and wished they had known better.
Where is all this misinformation coming from? The survey offers a detailed map. Social media is by far the most common source, cited by 61% of people who said they had encountered health misinformation. Websites and blogs came next, mentioned by 30%, followed closely by family and friends (27%) and traditional news media (26%). Work colleagues were a source for 20%, and AI chatbots for 19%. That last figure is a reminder that the problem is not just old-fashioned gossip; it has found new digital playgrounds. When people were asked which topics they had seen covered in false or misleading ways in the past six months, the most common were vaccines (24%), dietary supplements and weight-loss injections (21%), climate change (18%), and mental health (16%). These are not niche subjects. They are the very issues that shape how people protect themselves, whether that means getting jabbed, managing their weight, understanding the environmental pressures on health, or deciding how to look after their emotional wellbeing. Misinformation on these topics can be especially damaging because it tends to offer simple answers to complicated questions, and simple answers are often the most seductive. It slides into group chats, coffee breaks, and family dinners. It does not announce itself as false; it borrows the language of science, uses official-looking logos, and speaks with complete certainty. The report shows that people are encountering this content everywhere, which means avoiding it is almost impossible.
The damage, however, does not stop at one person’s bad decision. The report shows that about six in ten people believe health misinformation is likely, or very likely, to make people believe in and buy fake cures, undermine trust in health services, encourage people to refuse essential treatment, and divide communities into increasingly extreme camps. These fears are not abstract. A health service relies on trust: trust that vaccines are safe, that doctors are competent, that public health guidance is written with patients’ interests in mind. When that trust is eroded by a constant drip of misleading claims, the effects ripple far beyond the individual. People may avoid necessary medical care, put off screenings, or choose unproven remedies at the expense of treatments that would actually help them. And when misinformation pushes one group to mock another—when a person who gets vaccinated is seen as naive, or a person who hesitates is seen as reckless—it makes it harder to have the calm, evidence-based conversations that public health absolutely depends on. The report’s authors are careful to note that misinformation is sometimes dismissed as a fringe problem. But the survey suggests it is woven into the fabric of everyday life: a group chat, a celebrity post, a YouTube clip, a blog that looks official, a chatbot that answers with total confidence and no caveats. The collective cost is enormous, not only in physical health but in the stress, confusion, and division that misinformation leaves behind. When people cannot agree on basic facts, they cannot protect one another properly. That is not just a health crisis; it is a breakdown of common ground.
Perhaps the most hopeful part of the survey is that people do not want to accept this as the new normal. Nearly half of respondents (47%) said the UK Government should be doing more to address false or misleading health information. When asked what actions should be prioritised, three ideas stood out clearly. The first was legal: introduce laws to penalise those who profit from spreading false or misleading health information. The second was educational: teach the public how to identify unreliable health claims before acting on them. The third was technological: require social media companies to add warning labels to content that is potentially false or misleading. These are not radical demands. They reflect a simple desire for accountability and clarity. People want those who make money from harmful falsehoods to face consequences; they want themselves and their children to be better equipped to sort fact from fiction; and they want the platforms that dominate our attention to carry some responsibility for what flows through them. There is an understanding that free speech does not mean a free-for-all, and that the right to say something should not be the same as the right to profit from harming other people’s health. The public is not asking for censorship or a sterile world with no difference of opinion. They are asking for basic protections, the same kind they would expect from food labels or medicine guidelines. They want to be able to make health decisions with their eyes open, not based on hidden algorithms and paid promotions dressed up as advice.
Professor Liam Smeeth, the Director of LSHTM, put the findings in context with a warning that was difficult to ignore. “With a fifth of UK adults saying they have made a health decision they regret based on health misinformation, rising to a third of those aged under 34, and a fifth saying they know someone who has suffered serious harm as a result of health misinformation, this is a problem that we can no longer ignore,” he said. He pointed out that in a world of invisible algorithms and closed networks, both online and offline, people often do not know what false or misleading health information their families, friends, and neighbours are being exposed to. The report, he argued, gives a detailed picture of the problem—the concerns people have, the harm they believe is being caused, and the actions they think should be taken. His message was blunt: health misinformation is not a fringe problem; the false and misleading claims appearing in feeds, in online spaces, and in everyday conversation are seriously damaging the nation’s health. The hope, he said, is that the findings will motivate institutions across the UK to do more to help people identify and resist harmful misinformation, and to make genuinely trustworthy health information easier to find. This report should be a wake-up call. For every person who shared a misleading post without checking it, there is a person who acted on it and regretted it. For every confident-sounding chatbot, there is a confused patient. The good news is that the public can see the damage and wants better. The task now is to turn that frustration into action—through laws, education, and the courage of institutions to treat health misinformation as what it really is: a serious, growing, and preventable threat to health.