Environmental campaigner Georgina Downs has scored a landmark victory against the government over pesticide usage.

Downs, who founded the UK Pesticides Campaign in 2001, won her long-running battle after producing “solid evidence” at the high court, proving that people exposed to chemicals used to spray crops had suffered harm, reported The Guardian.

The court ruled the government had failed to comply with a European directive designed to protect rural communities from exposure to the toxins. It said DEFRA must reassess its policy and investigate the risks to people who are exposed. DEFRA had argued that its approach to the regulation and control of pesticides was “reasonable, logical and lawful”.

Downs was first exposed to pesticide spray in the garden of her parents’ house near Chichester, West Sussex, in 1984 when she was 11. She suffered several years of ill health, and after years of study into the possible causes, founded the UK Pesticides Campaign.

She said the government had failed to address the concerns of people living in the countryside “who are repeatedly exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals throughout every year, and in many cases, like mine, for decades”. Speaking after the ruling, Downs said her seven-year battle was over “one of the biggest public health scandals of our time” and called on Gordon Brown to block any DEFRA appeal.

The government “should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health and citizens of this country”, she said.

Down collected evidence from other residents reporting health problems including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, ME and asthma, which they claim could be linked to crop-spraying.

The judge said “defects” in DEFRA’s approach to pesticide safety contravened a 1991 EC directive and urged DEFRA secretary Hilary Benn to “ think again and consider what needs to be done”, reported The Guardian.

A DEFRA spokesman said: “Pesticides used in this country are rigorously assessed to the same standards as the rest of the EU and use is only ever authorised after internationally approved tests... We will look at this judgment in detail to see whether there are ways in which we can strengthen our system further and also to consider whether it could put us out of step with the rest of Europe and have implications for other member states.”

A final vote on the European parliament’s proposals to reduce the amount of crop protection products available to farmers is due next month or in January.