Blood tests in Lancashire reveal cancer-causing chemicals

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1:07Hello, I'm Sean Lay. Thank you for downloading the BBC's World Tonight podcast from Wednesday the 23rd of September. People in part of Lancashire who live close to a chemical factory have been told tests have found high levels of a cancer-causing drug in their bloodstream. We'll hear what's known and what's not about potential health risks. I've been talking to a father about to tell a Canadian court how his son took his own life using drugs sent to him by Canadian Kenneth Law. Law's just been convicted in Ontario but won't ever be prosecuted in the UK. President Xi Jinping is in the United States, his first visit in more than a decade.

1:45Our North America editor Sarah Smith tells us why hopes of fresh breakthroughs on trade and AI aren't high. But just how differently do Americans and Chinese people see the relationship between their two countries? Former UK Defence Minister Al Khaans, who resigned because he said the government wasn't spending enough on the nation's defence, tells me why he's backing a National Resilience Corps of Civilians to help in a time of crisis. And the Welsh words or phrases that have just been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. That's our programme coming up now in a minute. Tests on people living near a chemical factory in Lancashire have found high levels of a chemical in their bloodstream which is now recognised as one which can cause cancer.

2:28The forever chemical, as it's known, has been used in a plant at Thornton-Clevelies to help in the production of a non-stick coating for frying pans. AGC Chemicals, which now owns the site, says it stopped using perfluoroctanoic acid, known by the acronym PFOA, in 2012. Eight years later, the government banned it after the UN classified it as a Group 1 carcinogen, putting it in the highest category of risk. Mario Pantelli was one of those who received results of his blood test today. I didn't believe my results would be as high as they are. I don't know what the next course of action, other than speaking to someone clinically trained to give me advice on how I can, I suppose, get rid of these chemicals, from my system and what the potential causes are, you know, with them already being established in me.

3:23I'd like to get my kids tested to see if that can affect, you know, their development as well. We'll hear more from Mario in a moment. First, though, the BBC's environment correspondent, Jonah Fisher, has been covering this story. Jonah, this factory has been in centre in the past of using this particular chemical. How do we get to this point? Yeah, so this factory in Thornton-Clevelies near Blackpool has, as you said, for a long time been making basically the nonstick coatings that you might see on your saucepans at home. It was until 1999, ICI, now it's AGC Chemicals, a Japanese company. Now, what these coatings use is a chemical in the PFAS family, these forever chemicals.

4:08Now, they're chemicals which their strength is that they have incredible bonds in them. They can resist high temperatures. They can resist water. They can resist grease. And those are also characteristics which mean they don't break down when they're in nature. So where we got to this point, which was the which was the blood tests being being announced to those who'd had their blood tests today, was that a couple of years ago, investigative journalists tested water that was coming out of the site. They found traces of this PFOA, this forever chemical coming out. And to cut a long story short, it led to the Environment Agency carrying out tests on the soil of gardens in homes around the factory.

4:48And earlier this year, because of the traces of PFOA that they were finding, closing allotments and telling people not to eat eggs from their ducks or chickens because PFOA, as you said, there is a known carcinogen. Now, the question which arose next was people wondering if they had PFOA inside their bodies, people who'd been living closer. So they asked for tests that was then provided by independent sources. These journalists who were involved and also some law firms got involved to finance this. And today we had the result of these blood tests looking for this PFOA and the PFAS, which is the bigger family of chemicals.

5:29And they found that close to 70 percent of the people who were tested, who had their blood tested, had levels which under the American classification, we don't have a classification here in the UK, would be regarded as a high level, which brings with it possible adverse health consequences, possibly the risk of other diseases and possibly the risk of cancers like kidney cancer and testicular cancer. So that news was all being communicated today to those people who live near that factory and had those tests. A huge shock to them to hear that. Because we're going to hear from one of those residents who also I think you spoke to as well, Mario.

6:11But what do we know about the potential health risks and what are the company being saying? Well, it's a developing science to them. As I said, both the American and German authorities do have a sliding scale of what they regard as being potentially dangerous levels of PFAS chemicals within people's blood. And that's what has been used today to try and interpret these results. Here in the UK, the authorities are not so sure. The position of the UK Health Security Agency is that the science is unproven at this point. They published a paper just this week looking at the literature effectively said that the idea that chronic PFAS exposure, which might well be the case here near industrial sites, leads to adverse health impacts hasn't been proven.

6:57The evidence doesn't support it yet and more evidence needs to be gathered to come to those sort of conclusions. So here in the UK, we're slightly more on the fence than the German and American authorities. And just to talk about AGC Chemicals, which, of course, is the company that is still running that factory in Thornton-Clevely's. They are probably going to close down. They say they're having financial problems not linked to what's going on at the moment. But they have said that there is an investigation underway involving the council and the Environment Agency, and they do not want to speculate further on what the possible outcomes and next steps might be from that investigation.

7:37Jonah Fisher, our environment correspondent, thanks very much. Well, Mario Pantelli is one of the residents who received their blood test results today, and I asked him why he'd chosen to get tested. I had four chickens and four ducks, and the environmental agency were looking for keepers to have their eggs tested, and at the same time they tested my soil. my eggs and soil were contaminated with the chemicals and Lee Day then were holding an event so I should be clear Lee Day or a law firm yeah Lee Day or a law firm yeah sorry contacted them and showed them you know what the result showed and eventually the blood they offered to test our bloods which I really wanted to do knowing that I was eating contaminated eggs and today we got the results and I didn't really think much of it because I'm not too close to the chemical plant.

8:35What we should be clear about just for kind of the legal situation is that the company says that there's yet to be a ruling from the Environment Agency about contamination in the land. The blood tests haven't been done by the Environment Agency so they're a separate thing but nonetheless the Environment Agency says in its report that the chemical we're talking about, which is a PFOA as it's known, is likely to have come from the factory. Now as far as the blood tests are concerned, what do they indicate or what do they suggest, have you been told? Yeah, so I'm in the 99th percentile of results.

9:17So for context, the above average level is 20 nanograms, and that's increased risk of adverse effects, additional screening for thyroid function, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, and so on. And my results were combined 75 nanograms, so almost four times the above level so because there isn't a lot of evidence it's more this is what the data is telling you so the advice is to go to a clinician to get further advice uh on it but yeah for me i just went for peace of mind to try and understand what's happened and you know how the soil is and whatnot i'm even more confused with it all because i'm just concerned about my children I guess it's sort of a statement of the obvious that this hasn't given you peace of mind no no if anything I'm more worried now recently I think the last couple of weeks I've rehomed my ducks and chickens one because obviously since they told us not to eat the eggs we stopped eating the eggs yeah and secondly because they are the soil was tested and they did find you know contamination so it didn't feel morally right to keep the hens and ducks in the garden as well But even that's a little slight life change, I suppose, you know, because it was nice to go with the kids in the morning to collect the eggs and, you know, make our cakes and whatnot with the eggs.

10:46And obviously that stopped abruptly, so to speak. That's Mario Pantelli, one of the residents affected who's had blood test results today. Well, Stephanie Metzger is a policy advisor at the Royal Society of Chemistry, where she works on the wider group policy PFAS, which is this group of chemicals that includes PFOA, the one that was subsequently banned. Stephanie Metzger, thanks for talking to us about this. This kind of exposure that has been demonstrated by these blood tests, the question that most people will be asking is, is it preventable? Absolutely. It is preventable insofar as we now know that these chemicals, in particular this one PFOA, can have these negative health effects.

11:35However, in the past, we didn't necessarily have this evidence. And so people were using these chemicals, companies were using these chemicals in a variety of different applications, both in industrial applications and in consumer products. And so they have now spread throughout the environment and are in, for example, our soil and can be in our drinking water sources or in our food chains. And so it's harder to prevent this exposure now that the chemicals are out there in the environment. But we would hope that in the future we'd be able to do a better job controlling them to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

12:11There are no official guidelines in this country on what are acceptable levels of having this chemical in, whether it's in the land or in the water or in your bloodstream. There is a difficulty there, isn't there, of translating this into kind of useful risk assessments for people in terms of their health. And therefore, everything is a bit of a trade off between the benefits you get from a substance, the potential damage it may cause and whether that potential damage actually leads in individuals to particular outcomes that are damaging their health. And those things we all still don't know enough about, do we?

12:49You're exactly right.

13:19both what are the effects of these chemicals when we're exposed to them, and not only for the few that are fairly well studied at this point, like PFOA, but for the broader group of PFAS, as well as what happens when you get exposed to something like PFAS and also other things that might be out in the environment. How does that happen when you get cumulative exposure from multiple sources? We talk about this as a group of so-called forever chemicals because they are so resilient, as Jonah was saying, to things like, you know, oil and water. And therefore, they give you a protection. That's why we use them on some clothes, for example, to protect from wet weather gear and things like that.

13:58But in terms of this understanding, do we think longer term that they do eventually dissipate or do they remain as risky, say, 20, 30 years down the line as they would be the moment they were produced? So they do break down in very long time scales. But in terms of like our lifetime, for example, there are a lot of these chemicals will stick around in the environment. Our bodies also do pass them after a long time frame. So sometimes it can be years, it can sometimes take years for our body to flush them out. The problem in these cases, for example, when you're near a PFAS hotspot, like in this case, is that sometimes the amount that you're being exposed to every day, you know, week by week in your life might be accumulating in your body faster than your body can process it.

14:53And so that means that over time, these levels will build up. And when we see the levels building up to the levels, for example, I think you referenced those U.S. guidelines about potential areas of health, then, yeah, that's when it becomes a problem. Stephanie Metzger, we're going to have to leave it there, Stephanie's policy advisor at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Coming up later in the programme, we hear from the father of a man who is calling for a public inquiry in this country after his son took his own life after buying toxins off a Canadian man online. Kenneth Law's being sentenced is due to be sentenced shortly in Canada, but he won't face charges here.

15:28It, to me, makes no sense that he avoids being asked to answer for his crimes in the UK. I think our processes, our procedures, just fail to cope with this type of circumstance. Do stay with us for that. When foreign leaders arrive on an official visit, they're usually greeted by a senior figure from the host government, sometimes even the foreign minister, but rare it is that one leader turns up at the airport to greet another. Not, though, if you're the president of China. So in about half an hour's time, President Trump will be standing at the bottom of the aircraft steps at Joint Base Andrews to greet China's President Xi Jinping.

16:07When the military fly past and a lavish state banquet, it feels very different from the belligerence at the start of President Trump's second term, the bitter tit-for-tat as the two countries impose tariffs and export controls on one another. The BBC's North America editor, Sarah Smith, joins us from Washington. Sarah, this is in part because they sort of came to a kind of what you might call a ceasefire about a year ago when they met in South Korea.

16:36Yes, they were able to agree a truce, essentially, in a trade war between the two countries, where tit-for-tat trade tariffs had been escalating sky high and had reached 150 % in some cases. So they were able to agree a truce on that, but that is due to run out in November. So high on the agenda is trying to agree that they can continue to trade with no or very low tariffs. To get that to happen, though, the United States wants to talk to China about their broken promises over how much agricultural produce they would buy from the United States, and America's unhappy about the amount of rare earth minerals that China is agreeing to export to America.

17:17So there are some things on the table to be decided, but it's very much in their mutual interest to agree to extend the trade truce. What do we get the sense of what the tone is between the two men at the moment?

17:32Well, there is a great deal of mutual admiration, it would seem, from their public statements. And as you were saying, it's virtually unprecedented for Donald Trump to go to the airport to personally greet President Xi. There will be a very lavish state dinner here at the White House on Thursday. There's great effort has been going on to spruce up the White House to open President Trump's new marble helipad in time for President Xi to be able to use it. So it appears there's a great deal of excitement about this round here. Now, that, of course, doesn't mean that they'll necessarily be able to agree on things if they don't think it's in their national interest.

18:07And so if you look at something like AI, which would be very high up on the agenda after all the warnings we've had recently about the dangers of the technology, both China and America see themselves locked in a race to try to win supremacy and dominance over that technology. So neither of them are going to want to agree to rules that will slow down or hamper the development of AI in any way. And we've heard recently from Donald Trump, he thinks that these perilous warnings are a hoax anyway. But the one thing that they might come away with is an agreement to find a way to warn each other, notify each other if the technology is threatening to get out of control, a system not entirely dissimilar to the hotlines between Washington and Moscow that there were to try and deter nuclear war during the Cold War.

18:56There we go. Sarah Smith, our North America editor. in Washington, D.C. Thank you very much, Sarah. And don't forget that Sarah and her team are always available on AmeriCast wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Well, Donald Trump has certainly been keen to smooth out any differences ahead of the visit, saying he has a good relationship and declaring he doesn't know about China being repressive to journalists. Beijing and Washington may blow hot and cold, as Sarah was explaining. But what about the people they lead? Are they confused about the relationship between their countries? Well, Dinah Smeltz is a polling specialist at the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, which has been comparing the attitudes of the American and Chinese public.

19:35Diana, thanks for being with us on The World tonight. I should imagine polling in China poses particular difficulties. What sort of numbers of people were you able to get to and what were you able to ask them about? Yes, thank you for having me on your show and so I could describe some of the results from our Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Carter Center survey. There's a lot of challenges in conducting surveys in China. It's really hard to get a representative sample, given both the urban and rural areas of the country. It's a closed media environment, of course, and also potential for self-censorship because of sensitivities around the government.

20:18But we were able to kind of overcome these challenges by having the funds to sponsor a rigorously designed sample. It's a truly nationally representative study that we worked with NORC in Chicago on operationalizing in the field. And do the public in terms of the Chinese public see America as a threat, as a rival, as a friend? What's the perception? Yeah, so the perception is not a pretty one. Only 17 % say that the United States is a friend. And for context, it's very similar to views of Japan at 18 % say that's a friend. But it doesn't mean they see it necessarily as an enemy. There's a lot of in between.

21:09We just asked, are you a friend? Is the United States a friend or not a friend? They say not a friend. But they do see a really important relationship with the United States that hinges on trade. and 71 % say that the U.S.-China trade policies do more to strengthen China's national security than weaken it. Just 28 % say weaken it. So a lot revolves around the trade relationship, and 56 % of the Chinese say that trade and economic ties are the most important basis for the relationship between the two countries. And just to flip it, when we look at the American public opinion, are they as positive about trade?

21:47Are they more nervous about the military threat? What's the balance there? Yeah, so the Americans also view trade positively, and there's been a really interesting shift. My colleague Craig Khafura at the Council just put out a piece this week that shows that now 57 % of Americans compared to 40 % in 2024 think that the United States should work cooperatively with China versus try to contain or limit China. This is a big reversal from, especially right after the COVID years. So they also are starting to think trade is more important, but there's a lot more going on in the U.S. context in a time of incredible disruption in traditional U.S.

22:38foreign policy and also domestic issues. China is seen as more, perhaps, as the more balanced, less impulsive country right now in the world. Wow, that's quite revealing itself. Dina Smeltz, and forgive me for getting your name wrong earlier, Dina Smeltz, polling specialist at the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs. Thank you very much for being with us.

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24:06families of people who died after taking poison they bought from a canadian man online have been telling a canadian court about the devastating impact of the crime kenneth law has already pleaded guilty to counseling or aiding 14 people in the state of ontario to take their own lives his activities have been linked to 147 other deaths worldwide including dozens here in the UK. In May, the Crown Prosecution Service, the CPS, said it wouldn't be seeking Law's extradition to face charges here because of what it called, quotes, the real risk that the harm caused in England and Wales would never have been recognised in any court.

24:45Instead, Law formally admitted causing the deaths of 73 victims in England and Wales. 79 families in the UK say they lost a loved one because of his activities. On Thursday, the judge in Canada, who's been hearing from families before handing down a sentence, will hear a statement read out on behalf of David Parfit. His son, Tom, died five years ago. He was 22. Tom was a lovely man. He had a few really, really good friends. And if you talk to them, they'll describe somebody who had a wicked laugh and amazing sense of humour was good fun to be with. Also was quite wicked with his sense of humour.

25:30So, yeah, maybe that explains why he only had a small circle of good friends. So he was reading philosophy, had a real passion. I was honestly fascinated with what kind of career he'd grow out of reading philosophy. I think he was really focused on, I guess, a small number of things that he enjoyed intensely. He was away at university when he died. Yes, it was a horrendous time. I guess what I know now is still quite shocking to talk about it. What had actually happened behind the scenes is that Tom had found an online resource which pretended to be a community of people that would help. people like Tom who was struggling with mental health and ideating suicide recover but actually just behind that for that kind of facade was unfortunately a community of people that seemed to get a kick out of encouraging people to take their own life and then you know our lives just fundamentally changed so it's unnatural to to to lose a child but unfortunately there There are multiple people in this situation because of these internet sites and because of what Kenneth Law did.

26:58Now, he's not been tried or convicted of involvement in your son's death or indeed the death of anyone actually in the UK, but of 14 people in Ontario. That's right. It's, I think, highly unusual where you have a person of any nationality who's caused quite as much damage as Kenneth Law that he's not then tried here. The number of deaths that his trade has been responsible for, I believe, is well over 70 in the UK. I struggle to think of anybody else in British legal history who would cause that much damage. So it, to me, makes no sense that he avoids being asked to answer for his crimes in the UK.

27:49I think our processes of procedures just fail to cope with this type of circumstance. There are two aspects to this, aren't there? One, the communicating through the online fora, and the other is the physical sending of these substances to people all around the world. And what do you think could be done? I think first of all we haven't seen the government and regulators in the UK really stop and understand the multiple root causes of why Law was able to trade and why he was able to trade for so long. One of the things I'm calling for and other parents are calling for is a public inquiry to really understand all of the root causes and make sure there's accountability within the government to put in the investment and the resource that's needed to close down all of these avenues.