The biggest factor in whether you say wind turbines make you sick is someone telling you wind turbines will make you sick. That’s the result of two new studies on so-called “wind turbine syndrome,” reports DeSmogBlog’s Graham Readfern.
The first study exposed some people to the “infrasound” that groups like Fairhaven, MA’s “WindWise” say causes illness, while others were actually exposed to nothing (“sham infrasound”). Some were warned that it was likely to make them sick (“high expectancy”) while others were told it likely wouldn’t (“low expectancy”). The results:
The response from the “high expectancy” group was to report that the “infrasound” had caused them to experience more symptoms which were more intense. This was the case whether they were exposed to sham infrasound or genuine infrasound. The report explains that “the number of symptoms reported and the intensity of the symptom experienced during listening sessions were not affected by exposure to infrasound but were influenced by expectancy group allocation.”
In the low expectancy group, the infrasound and sham infrasound had little to no effect. In other words, the study found that if a person is told that wind turbines will make them ill then they are likely to report symptoms, regardless of whether they are exposed to infrasound or not.
So what does this mean for building and siting land-based wind turbines? Can you write by-laws to satisfy the “wind turbine syndrome” crowd, as Fairhaven is trying to do? Lead author Fiona Crichton:
The findings indicate that negative health information readily available to people living in the vicinity of wind farms has the potential to create symptom expectations, providing a possible pathway for symptoms attributed to operating wind turbines. This may have wide-reaching implications. If symptom expectations are the root cause of symptom reporting, answering calls to increase minimum wind-farm set back distances is likely to do little to assuage health complaints.
Another preliminary study from a public health professor at the University of Sydney finds “only a tiny proportion of people living near turbines do actually complain and, when they do, the complaints coincide with campaigning from anti-wind groups.”
The studies reaffirm mountains of independent studies showing no direct health impacts from wind turbines. But they also confirm that, as Stephen Colbert detailed, if you get told they’ll make you sick enough times, you might think wind turbines gave you herpes.
Cross-posted from The Green Miles
Its not enough to go on the defensive about wind, gotta go on the offensive about the alternatives. Most people, sad to say, do not think global climate change affects them or resonates with their day to day lives. But it does. Coal is a public health disaster from every stage of its lifecycle. Extracting it is incredibly dangerous for miners, just look at black lung and the terrible price we ask mining communities to pay to power us with 18th century technology. And we have to drill deeper, and now we have to strip mine and destroy tens of thousand year old mountains to get 20 years of coal. The damage there is irreparable with scars that last forever. Then there is runoff destroying local water supplies, and then there are power plants which rain down higher rates of asthma, cancer, and strokes upon communities where they are located and have to be extensively cleaned up once they are shut down.
Now is the time to take clean, cheap, sustainable wind energy which has no real public health effects.
is that what happened to the wind mill in Chelsea? I used to watch one behind Eastern Ave, visible from Rt C1 by Suffolk Downs, but haven’t seen it spinning for over a year. So, is it “wind turbine syndrome” that stopped it, or is it broken?
Looks like the turbine was supposed to provide power to the new Forbes Park development, which was halted when the economy crashed. I’m just going off a quick googling, but looks like it’s not running because the developer never plugged it into anything. (Could also be a mechanical issue.)
Once the mill had been constructed and put into operation, even if the project developed problems and the mill wasn’t powering it, the electricity generated could have been put into the grid. Thanks for the info.
but not so complex that it’s “cheaper” to leave it idle than to work through the regulations and then make money once it’s on.