Thomas Pringle is known in these parts for his vocal opposition of the West Eugene Parkway project because it would require the destruction of wetlands.

But Pringle is known in media and scientific circles around the world as the man with the mad cow disease Web site.

His site, www.mad-cow.org, gets about 8,000 to 9,000 visitors each day and has recorded more than a million hits in the five years he's been running it.

The low-tech Web site has become a global meeting place and bulletin board for scientists and has placed Pringle in the middle of the ongoing scientific debate and inquiry into this baffling, disquieting disease and how it affects human health.

From a computer at his home in south Eugene, Pringle posts the latest news stories and scientific research articles on mad cow disease and a variety of related afflictions.

Pringle also posts his own running commentary and critiques, attributed to the unnamed Webmaster.

"I try to keep it anonymous," Pringle said. "I try to let the Web site do the talking."

But Pringle does a lot of talking to the news media and has been quoted in publications ranging from the New York Times to the International Herald Tribune to Field & Stream.

He's typically described as an expert and chief researcher with the Sperling Biomedical Foundation, though it's usually not mentioned that he is the foundation's sole researcher. His academic background is in molecular biology and mathematics.

"What I really bring to this is the ability to synthesize a lot of complex information from all different quarters," he said.

The Sperling group is a small family foundation, and its name is an anagram of the family name, because some Pringles didn't want their name associated with the foundation, he said. His family made its money not from potato chips, he added, but from Scottish cashmere sweaters.

His interest in mad cow disease stems from his research into a related affliction, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk. He took over the Web site from a scientist about five years ago and it soon took on a life of its own.

"If you offer quality information you can attract a following and have an influence on the education level of people and indirectly those people go out and influence policy," he said. "I think I've done pretty well in the marketplace of ideas."

Pringle said he loves that for the $14 a month he pays to an Internet service provider, he has virtually unlimited space for posting and archiving information. He sees his Web site as a new model for reporting original scientific research.

"It levels the playing field," he said.

Mad cow disease is part of a family of rare, fatal brain diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. Scientists theorize they're caused by prions, which are normal protein molecules that fold into abnormal shapes and become infectious.

Scrapie, a prion disease afflicting sheep and goats, has been around since at least the 1700s. Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was discovered in England in 1984 and has affected nearly 200,000 cattle. Scientists suspect the disease was caused by feeding rendered cow meat-and-bone meal, including brains and spinal cords, to young calves.

In humans, the most-well known prion disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD. It affects about one in a million people and about four Oregonians a year, according to Dr. Fred Hoesley, an epidemiologist with state Health Division. Most cases are "sporadic," meaning the cause is random, isolated and unknown.

CJD is often confused with a new variant CJD, or nvCJD, a disease that appeared in 1994 in England and has been linked to mad cow disease - most likely the result of eating beef products contaminated by central nervous system tissue.

Mad cow disease has been confirmed in England, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. A European Union report released Monday said it probably exists in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and five other countries.

Neither mad cow disease nor its human variant, nvCJD, has been detected in the United States since active surveillance by public health officials began in 1990. The Centers for Disease Control said it is "extremely unlikely" mad cow disease would become a foodborne illness in the United States.

But Pringle is not so sure, and he's not convinced U.S. government scientists are looking hard enough, or at all, for answers. Prion diseases can be in the body for 10 or more years before symptoms develop.

"It's only a matter of time until we see new variant CJD show up in America," he said.

"Everyone in the Western world has been exposed to some product from some known TSE countries," he said. "Whether that exposure was high enough to jump start the disease, that's not known. Not everybody who eats a bad hamburger in England gets infected, but you can't say who is slowly incubating. As long as they're not donors, that's probably the end of it."

Pringle's Web site and public profile, coupled with his background of environmental activism, has earned him the ire of critics, who have tried to discredit him as an extremist.

A story on the conservative Web site, www.frontpagemag.com, headlined "Will the Leftists Kill Bambi?" describes Pringle as a "mathematician, vegetarian and anti-development activist from the radical haven of Eugene, the `Berkeley of Oregon,' with friends in the militant environmental group Earth First!"

The Guest Choice Network, an arm of the national restaurant lobby, decries "the nanny culture" of public interest groups, environmentalists, animal rights activists and government regulators who are trying to take all the fun out of the good things in life.

A manifesto on the group's Web site, "Mad Cow: A New American Scare Campaign," portrays Pringle as "an oft-quoted but highly suspect Oregon environmental activist" who is part or a puppet of a cadre of alleged mad cow experts with a bone to pick."

Its communications director, John Doyle, said his main concern with Pringle is the way he's described in the media as an impartial expert when he really has an environmental, anti-meat agenda.

"He's been profiled in the international media and the paper of record (the New York Times) as a mad cow expert and he's not," Doyle said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. "He needs more upfront acknowledgment of his prior bias and the extent of his foundation."

Pringle said his critics are "public relations employees at large Washington, D.C., and New York companies" who attack him because they can't attack the science.

"On the science side, I'm sure they don't have a clue what I'm talking about," he said. "Why don't they approach it in a more appropriate form? The whole discourse has been unprofessional."

He said he has no hidden agenda.

"What I've found is there isn't any room for an agenda," he said. "I feel like I'm just on the sideline. My agenda is, the truth is out there somewhere and let's get it on the Web."