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From The Sunday TimesNovember 16, 2008There’s no escape from Georgina Downs, the poisoned ‘Pesticide Nun’Last week Georgina Downs won a landmark case that could halt crop spraying. Shetells John-Paul Flintoff of her dogged campaign

David Miliband, the secretary of state, was nobbled on his way out of the loo.Professor David Coggon, chairman of a government advisory committee, was pinneddown in a hotel bar. For those responsible for government policy on pesticidesthere has been no escape in recent years from Georgina Downs.

Now aged 35, she has for much of her life been exposed to a horrific cocktail ofpesticides that was regularly sprayed on farmland beside her family home inChichester, West Sussex. The spraying started when she was 11 and continues tothis day - seven years on from when she first decided to devote herself full-timeto making the countryside safer for the people who live in it.

Now, at last, she has reason to hope that she has made a difference. On FridayDowns won a ground-breaking legal case that represents probably the mostsignificant setback for the agricultural chemicals industry in 50 years. Thejudicial review found that the government had failed to protect people,particularly rural residents, from exposure to pesticides. This judgment - againstthe Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) - represents asignificant breakthrough in a crusade that has already been compared with earliercampaigns to prove the health dangers of tobacco and asbestos.

Some farmers believe that the ruling may even lead to pesticides being banned –and that crop yields will fall significantly as a result (although the SoilAssociation says organic farming can actually produce greater yields).

Downs has now called on the government to ban spraying immediately near homes,schools and other public areas. The government is expected to appeal but for themoment she is enjoying her victory - the culmination of a campaign fought withextraordinary determination, despite appalling health problems.

She doesn’t like to talk about them, preferring to emphasise the importance ofavoiding similar poisonings in future, but she has been in hospital for severemuscle wasting, leg pain and other chronic symptoms. Her father hinted darkly onthe court steps that her health is worse than anyone realises; doctors say she hasthe brittle bones more usually found in a woman of 90.

For years the Downs family had no idea what was ailing her. Symptoms initiallyincluded blisters inside her mouth and throat; in 1991 her legs gave way. “I wasabsolutely devastated. I didn’t know what was going wrong. My body completelyfailed me,” she tells me.

Then, one day, she happened to look out of a window and noticed that the

neighbouring farmer was spraying his crops. Wondering if this might be the cause,she asked him to give her family notice before he sprayed in future, but hetypically gave only 10 minutes’ warning. (Bee-keepers, the judge drily noted, get48 hours.) In any case, the sheer number of times that he sprayed his crops ruledout much chance of getting out of the way - last year’s salad crop alone wassprayed 30 times in six months.

So she made a complaint to the Health and Safety Executive. But although officialsadmitted privately that they wouldn’t like spraying to take place near their ownhomes, they were unable to prevent it because the farmer was acting within thelaw. The information distributed with pesticides urges farmworkers to wear safety

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equipment; but anybody else nearby is not deemed to be at risk.

At any rate, the only measure used to consider risk to anybody else was thespuriously scientific “bystander risk assessment”. This assumes that bystandersare exposed only briefly to one form of pesticide, just once.

On Friday the judge agreed that the “assessment” was inadequate and failed to takeaccount of the hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions - who live nearfields that are routinely sprayed.

For what it’s worth, Downs emphasises that her campaign is not against farmers.Indeed, many of the thousands who have contacted her are farmers’ wives andchildren who have been exposed to the lethal chemicals.

In 2001 she realised that the only solution was to change the regulations. She hadalready given up her career in musical theatre because of ill health and returnedto live with her parents after a spell in London. She gave her project a year -“That’s how naive I was,” she says. In the games room at her parents’ home, thegreen baize of the full-size snooker table is still covered by her paperwork.

As well as pursuing her legal case, she made a film showing a family of mannequins- including a pregnant woman and a baby - sitting in the garden as the adjacentfield was sprayed, and another in which people living near sprayed fieldsdescribed their symptoms. The list of ailments was extensive; indeed, Mr JusticeCollins acknowledged that the film provided solid evidence to back up Downs’scase.

She methodically set out to lobby the experts and politicians who could help tochange the regulations. Over the years she has seen four ministers and severalsenior advisers at Defra as well as innumerable MEPs and two Europeancommissioners.

“When I first started attending conferences,” she says, “I made sure I stayed inthe same hotel as many of the government advisers. Once, I managed to speak to thethen chairman of the advisory committee on pesticides, Professor David Coggon, fortwo hours in a hotel bar. This led to him inviting me to make a crucialpresentation to the committee, which was covered by the Today programme and got memy first meeting with ministers.”

Since then Coggon has done less to help; in fact, she accuses him of being one ofthose who are responsible for the poisoning of people like herself. “ProfessorCoggon informed me that he only saw 15 minutes of my two-hour film, the one thejudge described as solid evidence, saying it was not a good use of his time.”

Junior ministers were generally supportive of Downs’s campaign, but getting policychanged required the support of the environment secretary. So she approached DavidMiliband, now the foreign secretary. “He turned me down twice in writing, so I

went to a conference and got him coming out of the loo. I told him my name andsaid he’d refused to meet me twice and I wanted to know why.

“At first he looked confused but the third time I asked, he said, ‘Georgina, ifthere was a reason to meet you, I would have met you’ - or words to that effect.He was very arrogant.”

She had no greater success with Hilary Benn, the current secretary of state.