“Make sure you monitor your employees and your own health to ensure that adverse affects are detected promptly before anyone becomes seriously ill.”It adds that serious poisoning can result in extreme difficulty in breathing and convulsions without medical treatment, something farmers now know only too well. They are angered by the HSE’s latest information pamphlet and its belated admission of the dangers of OPs. To get that certificate, farmers have to sit a one-and-a-half hour test paper under exam conditions, complete a form outlining their dipping plans, and show they know how to select the right treatment and how to store and dispose of the chemicals.Many farmers also believe the action has come too late. Since April this year, no one has been able to buy OP dips unless they have obtained a certificate of competence. They maintain that compulsory dipping was stopped because the alarming side-effects were coming to light, hence the Health and Safety Executive’s recent introduction of stringent conditions for those who still want to use OPs. She says several dozen have had severe heart problems and other conditions as a result of the OP dips.”These people’s lives have been ruined,” she says.While the Ministry of Agriculture says the decision to de-regulate in 1992 was based on the fact that dipping had not eradicated scab and was unlikely to do so, the farmers tell a different story.

“We believe it was due to long- term exposure to OPs,” he says. Similarly, Elizabeth Sigmund, of the South West Environmental Protection Agency, has collated data on 300 farmers. He has found evidence of peripheral nervous system damage affecting the nerves to the arms and legs causing numbness, pins and needles, fatigue, unusual reactions to hot and cold sensations and loss of power in limbs. To wake up on a hospital bed and see your family around you, knowing you almost died, is devastating.”"I am bitter about this,”echoes Lady Mar, “because I think the Ministry are trying to cover up their tracks and say it’s not their fault, but they have known since the Fifties how dangerous these things are.”Dr Goran Jamal, consultant neurophysiologist at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, is one of Europe’s leading experts on OPs and a member of the Government’s advisory panel on their use.

“The OPs have damaged the nerves controlling my heart rhythm. Gary Coomber, a 32-year-old Kent farmer, suffered a serious heart attack three years ago, a direct result, he believes, of four years spent using OP sheep dips. His lawyers have issued a writ, not yet served, against two manufacturers, alleging that the use of their products damaged his health.”I am very angry about what has happened to me,” he says. The scale of the problem – more than 500 farmers now claim to have been harmed – is the subject of a major conference involving the National Farmers’ Union and the British Medical Association tomorrow.Farmers believe that the Ministry of Agriculture is deliberately covering up its failure to recognise sooner the real dangers of handling OPs. Once the dip overflowed into my wellington boots but we never thought it could be really dangerous, never.”Since 1989, she has suffered fatigue and muscular pain, followed by bouts of nightmares, sweating and chest pains as well as suspected changes in her central nervous system which have slowed down her reactions, including her speech.Lady Mar is one of several hundred farmers who have reported ill health as a result of using OPs to control sheep scab.

“I was what they called the paddler, the one with the hooked stick who ducks the sheep at the front. It was hard work and you got splashed quite a bit, but everybody got involved. Each flock would be dipped on a rota and as the men and women worked on the dip, the children played in the fields.”Everyone had to dip; it was part of farming,” explains Lady Mar, who helped with the dipping for five years before becoming ill. In some rural communities, especially in Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland, dipping was almost a social occasion, with neighbouring farmers helping each other out. It was about this time that Lady Mar realised that the illness she has suffered since 1989 was caused by exposure to OPs. They are from the same family of compounds developed in Nazi Germany as agents to attack the nervous system and contain the same chemical as the nerve gas sarin, used in the attack on the Tokyo underground earlier this year.From 1976 until 1992, dipping of the 44 million sheep in Britain was compulsory The most widely used liquids in these dips were OPs. She didn’t know at the time, but what she had was sheep-dippers’ flu.