Get the facts on health
Fact checks about medical conditions, the NHS, social care and government funding of national health services
Get the facts on… How healthy are we? Is the NHS being privatised? Immigration and the NHS
Health misinformation can ruin lives and damage health services. Our health team fact checks claims about health including funding and delivery, and dangerous medical claims, and makes recommendations to improve the quality of public information about health. We are grateful to the Health Foundation and the European Media and Information Fund for their support of this work.
As an independent charity, none of our funders have a say in what we choose to check, or our conclusions. More information about our funding.
Latest health fact checks
You do not inhale a credit card’s worth of microplastic every week
This misunderstanding traces back to a scientific paper that said no such thing.
NHS England was wrong to claim its data showed 3.4 million children are ‘unprotected’ against measles
It seems the health service actually calculated that 3.4 million children might have missed at least one vaccine dose.
More confusion over how many people are waiting for NHS treatment
Claims that 7.6 million people are waiting for treatment have resurfaced, but that's the number of courses of treatment people in England are waiting for, with some people waiting for …