About OPIN

OPIN is an independent organisation, funded from charitable sources. We developed from an environmental group, the South West Environmental Protection Agency founded in 1988, and since 1992 have concentrated our work on the problem of ill-health related to occupational exposure to organophosphates (OPs).

The background to the chronic ill-health among sheep-farmers is that they were obliged, in law, to dip their sheep in a prescribed dip from the mid-1970s until 1992. All the dips were OP compounds, except one which was more expensive and less effective. The farmer could be fined heavily if he was found to have sheep suffering from untreated sheep-scab on his farm.

Successive governments have avoided giving doctors the full facts about the chronic effects of small, repeated exposures to OPs. The 1951 Zuckerman Committee, reporting to the Agriculture Committee on Toxic Chemicals in Agriculture, said of OPs that the main problems were their extreme toxicity and their chronic effects. It laid down recommendations for the training of doctors and "regular weekly health monitoring" of OP exposed workers, so that they could be taken off work with OPs if "early symptoms were found",and it said that a system should be set up to warn rural GPs if work involving OPs was going on in their area, so that they could be prepared for seeing symptoms. None of this has ever happened; the government has advised doctors that concerns about chronic ill-health related to pesticide exposure are non-proven, and have recommended, in a report from the Royal Colleges of Psychiatry and Physicians, that patients should be treated with consideration, anti–depressants and "cognitive therapy".

OPIN publishes and circulates a free quarterly newsletter to the people on the OPIN database (numbering about 750), providing news of developments in scientific research, advice on contacting expert medical consultants capable of diagnosing OP poisoning, legal firms taking OP personal injury cases and how to apply for Industrial Injury Benefit (available for employees only). We put people in touch with other sufferers in their own area who are also ill, for mutual support.

OPIN works closely with a group of medical practitioners from different specialities, with legal firms and barristers, with Paul Tyler's All-Party OP Group of MPs, and with many journalists. Nurses, doctors, social workers, CAB officers, dieticians and others ask for advice and information. We undertake personal counselling of sick individuals by letter and telephone, and pick up referrals to us from the NFU, GPs, and MPs.

The people who contact us come from all parts of the UK, from crofters from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to farmers in west Cornwall, from Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire. This is a rural tragedy, destroying the health and livelihoods of farming families who simply obeyed the law. OPIN is the only organisation which deals in detail exclusively with the problems associated with OPs, but has the co-operation and support of various other organisations including the Pesticide Trust, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Church of England Rural Support Group.