The symptoms are small at first.
You feel a little more tired than usual, perhaps a bit forgetful.
You shrug it off as stress.
After a while, you feel a little more than tired.
You feel unwell.
It's hard to tell what could be making you feel this way.
Your diet.
A long running cold.
It doesn't happen all at once.
Basic tasks are making you feel like you're lost before you know it.
It's all consuming, but the doctor's standard tests don't show anything.
No one knows what's happening inside your body.
Something has been accumulating.
There is tox lead inside you and it's poisoning you.
My name is Laura Hughes,
and for the past two years I've been uncovering the United Kingdom's perplexing relationship with lead.
What I found has shocked me.
I think the most terrifying thing is that once it's happened,
there's not really an easy route out of it.
The damage is done, ticking along, incrementing a little bit, a little bit more,