Imagine waking up, scrolling through your phone, and stumbling upon a health claim that seems too perfect to be true: a miracle cure for a chronic condition, a scary warning about a vaccine, or a weight-loss injection that promises life-changing results with no side effects. For many people in the UK, this is not a hypothetical scenario—it is part of daily online life, and sometimes it leads to real decisions, and real regret. A new report from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), titled Health Misinformation: Public Perceptions of Threat to the UK, released on 28 September 2026, paints a vivid picture of how false or misleading health information is shaping public behaviour. Based on a survey of 2,110 UK adults conducted by Survation on 9–10 September 2026, the report reveals that one in five people aged 18–34 have made a health decision based on misinformation that they later regretted. Even more alarming, 38% of those aged 18–24 said they personally knew someone who had suffered serious harm as a result of acting on false or misleading health information—harm such as contracting a preventable disease, delaying essential medical treatment, or experiencing symptoms for far longer than necessary. This is not a niche concern reserved for the most gullible; it is woven into the everyday experiences of young people, largely through the digital ecosystems they trust most.
The anxiety does not stop with personal experience; it radiates outward into families and communities, creating a kind of low-grade public dread about the safety of the people we love. The survey found that half of all UK adults—49%—are worried that their family members could be harmed by health decisions made on the basis of misinformation. That worry is accompanied by a troubling lack of confidence in our own ability to tell truth from falsehood. Nearly one in five people (19%) said they were either not very confident or not at all confident when judging whether a health claim was accurate. Meanwhile, 42% of respondents said they worried about their family members sharing health claims online without first checking whether those claims were true. This suggests a deep, uncomfortable paradox: we know misinformation is all around us, and we fear its effects on others, but many of us feel poorly equipped to identify it ourselves. It also points to a broader emotional toll. The home, once a place of trusted advice and private conversations about health, now becomes another channel for misinformation to spread—often unintentionally, as a loved one forwards a sensational article with the best of intentions. In that sense, health misinformation is not just a technological problem; it is an intimate one, affecting how families talk, warn, and care for one another.
Where exactly is this misinformation coming from? The report offers a detailed map of the channels through which false and misleading health content reaches UK adults. By far the most common source, cited by 61% of people who had encountered misinformation, was social media. Nearly a third (30%) said they had come across it on websites or blogs, while 27% pointed to family or friends. Interestingly, 26% cited traditional news media as a source, and 20% said work colleagues. Perhaps most striking for a rapidly changing information landscape, 19% said they had encountered health misinformation through AI chatbots—a reminder that the battle for accurate health information is now being fought not just between human voices, but between humans and algorithms too. The report also looked at the specific topics that dominate the misinformation landscape. Over the six months before the survey, 24% of people had seen false or misleading claims about vaccines, 21% about dietary supplements or weight-loss injections, 18% about climate change, and 16% about mental health. These are not abstract or distant subjects. They touch decisions that people make every day—whether to vaccinate a child, whether to buy a supplement, how to understand the effects of environmental change on health, and how to support a struggling mind. Each of these topics carries real stakes, and each becomes more dangerous when distorted by false claims.
Perhaps the most unsettling part of the report is not what misinformation has already done, but what people believe it is going to do if left unchecked. Around six in ten respondents agreed that health misinformation makes it very or somewhat likely that people will believe in or buy fake cures, undermine trust in health services, influence people to refuse essential treatment, and divide society, pushing people into more extreme views. This consensus reveals a widespread recognition that misinformation is not simply a minor irritation or a nuisance clutter in our social media feeds. It is seen as an active threat to the foundations of public health. When people lose trust in vaccines, they hesitate to protect themselves and others. When they delay treatment because of misleading claims, their conditions can worsen, adding pressure to an already strained healthcare system. When they buy fake cures, they waste money and hope. And when communities fracture along lines of belief and suspicion, public health campaigns become far more difficult to run. The report captures a public that is not naive about these risks. They understand, perhaps from personal observation or from stories in the news, that health misinformation carries serious, even life-threatening consequences. The fear is not abstract; it is practical, communal, and deeply felt.
Given the scale of the concern, it is hardly surprising that the public is calling for action—and that they expect the government to take the lead. Nearly half of those surveyed (47%) said the UK Government should be doing more to address false or misleading health information. When asked what measures should be prioritised, the most popular answers were concrete and decisive: introducing laws to penalise those profiting from false or misleading health information, educating the public about how to identify inaccurate claims, and requiring social media companies to add warning labels to potentially misleading health content. These preferences suggest that people do not want only individual resilience; they want systemic change. They want the people and platforms that profit from misinformation to face consequences. They want schools, campaigns, and public institutions to teach critical thinking about health claims. And they want the tech companies that design our information environments to accept some responsibility for what travels through them. Speaking about the findings, Professor Liam Smeeth, Director of LSHTM, made the urgency clear: “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.” His words carry a warning that echoes beyond the report itself: in a world of invisible algorithms and closed online networks, we often have no idea what health information our friends, neighbours, and relatives are being exposed to—or what they might do with it.
Of course, no study is perfect, and the report is honest about its limitations. It relies on self-reported information, which means participants may not remember every encounter with misinformation or may be reluctant to admit their own mistakes. The sample sizes for UK regions outside England were also relatively small, so regional comparisons should be treated with caution. But even with these caveats, the report provides one of the most detailed pictures yet of how health misinformation is experienced by real people across the UK. It shows that the problem is not confined to the extremes of the internet, nor to a small group of vulnerable individuals. It is present in social media feeds, in blogs, in conversations with colleagues, in news coverage, and increasingly in the output of AI chatbots. It covers vaccines, weight-loss products, mental health, and climate change. Most importantly, it is causing harm, and the public is worried. The report was funded entirely by LSHTM, an independent institution with no commercial or political agenda, which gives its findings an additional layer of credibility. As Professor Smeeth suggests, the hope is that these findings will push institutions across the UK—government, health services, schools, media organisations, and technology companies—to think more seriously about what they can do to help people identify and resist harmful health misinformation, and to ensure that trustworthy, accessible health information is available to everyone. In an age of information overload, the most valuable resource may not be more content, but more clarity.