Blood-Testing National-Context Official-Response by Hillhouse Watch

Blood Tests in a UK PFAS Community: What Bentham Found, and What It Means Here

For the first time in England, blood tests have been conducted in a community living near a PFAS-contaminated industrial site. The results from Bentham, North Yorkshire were alarming. The official response was almost identical to what Hillhouse residents have already been told. The question that follows is straightforward: what would testing show here?

Primary sources used in this post:
  • Guardian, 20 March 2026 — Bentham blood testing results
  • ITV News, 20 March 2026 — In Our Blood investigation findings
  • Guardian TV review, 22 March 2026 — In Our Blood documentary
  • Wyre Council FOI response, 6 March 2026 — refusal of biomonitoring

What Happened in Bentham

On Sunday 22 March 2026, ITV1 broadcast In Our Blood: The Forever Chemicals Scandal — a joint investigation by ITV Exposure and ENDS Report. The documentary centred on Bentham, a small town in North Yorkshire, and the results of blood testing conducted on 39 residents and former factory workers.

Bentham is home to Angus Fire, one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of firefighting foam. Between 1976 and 2024, the company legally produced firefighting foams containing PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called forever chemicals. Routine testing of those foams involved setting fires on the factory site and extinguishing them with the foam. Residents recall regular smoke plumes from those tests.

In May 2024, groundwater on the Angus Fire site was found to contain the highest known concentrations of PFAS ever recorded in the UK (The Guardian and ENDS Report, May 2024). As of March 2026, the site has been investigated but no blood testing had been offered to residents by public health authorities.

ITV and ENDS Report arranged their own testing.

The Results

39 people were tested. All lived within 1 kilometre of the factory or had worked there. Blood analysis was carried out by Eurofins Environment Testing in Sacramento, California. Results were analysed by Dr David Megson, environmental forensic scientist at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Because the UK has no official guidance on safe levels of PFAS in blood, results were compared against the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) benchmarks — the same standard used by the scientific panel advising the Jersey government:

  • Above 2 ng/ml: potential for adverse health effects
  • Above 20 ng/ml: increased risk; more frequent health screenings advised

The findings, as reported by the Guardian (20 March 2026) and ITV News (20 March 2026):

  • The highest level recorded was 405 ng/ml — in a former factory worker — more than 200 times the lower NASEM threshold
  • 23% of those tested (9 of 39) were above the higher 20 ng/ml threshold
  • Two-thirds were in the top 5% of the US background population
  • One-third had levels higher than any expected in a general background population

Dr Megson, commenting on the results (Guardian, 20 March 2026):

“I was absolutely shocked when we started to run this data. Nearly everybody we tested was above average and two-thirds of them were in the top 5%. A third of them were higher than anything we’d ever expect to see in the background population. So that was really shocking, and quite staggering.”

Dr Shubhi Sharma, Chem Trust (Guardian, 20 March 2026):

“The Pfas levels in people’s blood in Bentham are alarming, especially given that these chemicals have been linked to a variety of adverse health outcomes including certain cancers.”

The baby of one resident, Rachel Harrison, tested at 13 ng/ml. Her toddler tested at 10 ng/ml. Rachel herself tested at 2 ng/ml.

The Official Response

Angus Fire issued a statement responding to the blood test results. From ITV News (20 March 2026):

“It is unfounded to classify [the] blood data as ‘unusually high’ in the UK context.”

“Having raised Pfas levels in blood is neither an indicator of health, nor of the way in which Pfas has been absorbed.”

The company also argued that the sample of 39 was “extremely small” and that the data was “not proof of harm.”

The Parallel

In March 2026, Wyre Council formally responded to an FOI request asking why biomonitoring had not been conducted for residents living near the Hillhouse industrial estate in Thornton-Cleveleys. The council’s response cited advice from UKHSA and Lancashire County Council. The stated position (FOI ref: FOI003176, 6 March 2026):

“Individual results are often uninterpretable. It is not possible to determine how the individual has been exposed to the substance under investigation… it is not possible to interpret results to potential adverse health effects.”

“Therefore, at this time, we would not recommend biomonitoring through either NHS services or private blood tests due to difficulties interpreting any results.”

The argument structure is the same. In Bentham, the company said blood levels cannot be classified as high in the UK context, and are not indicators of health. In Thornton-Cleveleys, the public health agencies advising Wyre Council said blood results cannot be interpreted in terms of exposure source or health effects, and testing is therefore not recommended.

Both arguments rest on the same foundation: the UK has no official blood PFAS reference values. That regulatory gap, rather than the absence of scientific evidence, is doing the work in both cases. The NASEM reference values, used in Bentham and by the Jersey advisory panel, exist and are available. They were not applied here.

What Bentham Is, and What Hillhouse Is Not

The Bentham comparison is relevant but is not identical to the Hillhouse situation, and overstating the parallel would be inaccurate.

The key difference is scale and chemical profile. Angus Fire in Bentham primarily produced and tested PFAS-containing firefighting foams, with PFOA as the contamination of concern. The Hillhouse industrial estate in Thornton-Cleveleys is a fluorochemical manufacturing complex — one of the largest in Europe — producing a wider range of fluorinated compounds, including EEA-NH4, a perfluoroether carboxylic acid classified as a reproductive toxicant (category 2).

Research published in Environmental Science & Technology (2025) found PFOA at the AGC Hillhouse discharge point at concentrations 206 times the EU drinking water standard, and detected EEA-NH4 in air and water around the site for the first time. The same paper identified airborne PFOA from the site 20 kilometres away at Hazelrigg. An estimated 145 tonnes of PFAS have been emitted from the Hillhouse site in total — a figure cited in the 2025 paper.

No blood testing has been offered to, or accepted by, residents of Thornton-Cleveleys living adjacent to the Hillhouse site.

The Question That Follows

Bentham is the first documented community in England where systematic blood testing has been conducted near a PFAS-contaminated site. The results showed that 23% of those tested were above the highest NASEM risk threshold, and two-thirds were in the top 5% of US background population levels.

The investigative journalists who arranged that testing — ITV Exposure and ENDS Report — did so because public authorities had not. That is precisely the situation residents adjacent to the Hillhouse site are in now.

If residents living near a firefighting foam factory in North Yorkshire have PFAS levels that shocked one of the UK’s leading experts in environmental forensics, the question of what systematic testing might find in Thornton-Cleveleys — adjacent to a fluorochemical manufacturing complex that has been operating for decades — is one that available evidence does not currently allow anyone to answer.

That is an information gap, not a finding of safety.

Note on Dr David Megson

Dr Megson, who analysed the Bentham blood results, is the lead author of Megson et al. (Chemosphere, 2024) — a peer-reviewed study that identified hundreds of PFAS compounds in UK freshwater near the Hillhouse site. He has also independently sampled soils around the AGC plant and, according to the Guardian (October 2025), confirmed the presence of EEA-NH4 in those soils. He described what he found as “a giant chunk of toxic material.”

His involvement in both investigations is noted, though it does not alter the factual content of either.

Sources for this post: