Inventing Victims - Wind Turbine Syndrome in Ontario

Today's guest editorial comes from Richard (Dick) Hill, a retired researcher who is interested in the social advantages of wind power and environmental protection.   As a former mayor, he is also intrigued by the political and activist hypocrisy approach in attacking this new energy source.

The effect and non-effect of Ontario wind turbines is a topical discussion.  I have just read a book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathon  Haidt (Pantheon 2012), which provides significant thought on how humans react with something new and what drives people who are resistant to change.  Haidt basically comments that if somebody doesn’t like change or the appearance of wind turbines, they will invent victims to justify their assumptions.

In Ontario, the anti-wind turbine syndrome is mainly a creation of the Conservative Party in an effort to minimize any environmental and economic effects initiated by the Liberal Party, in particular the Green Energy Act of 2009.  It is used as a political wedge issue to create FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt.  The unsubstantiated issues of public health and economics are secondary to the political challenge of defeating the opposition by any means.

There are over 250,000 large wind turbines around the world producing environmentally friendly electricity with little social or economic comment.  Even in Ontario the most effected people, with operating wind turbines on their property, do not complain.  If the anti-wind activist statements were true, most of Europe would be dead by now.  The wind turbine syndrome is essentially an Ontario illness.

The well-funded anti-wind activists talk of supposed harms without scientific or technical evidence that stand jurisprudence.  It is an issue searching for a problem with reasoning in support of emotional reactions for the judgements they have already made.  Most people make first judgements quickly and then search for reasons to support them.

Many of the supposed harms from wind turbines are fabricated myths with preposterous victim claims. The anti-wind zealots are not searching for veracity, but are reasoning in support of their emotional reactions using distorted scientific studies, social media and Google to find support.   This confirmatory mindset is a one-sided method to rationalize a particular point of view in support of their decision.  This extreme partisanship can be addictive, forming a consensual hallucination.

There are multiple ills attributed to wind turbines with headaches, nausea, and sleep loss being most prevalent. These problems are common with modern living of which around 20 to 50 percent of the population complain whether or not they live near wind turbines.  The symptoms are real but the causes are general.

This situation is political opinion that is not based on real facts.  Well-funded lobby groups have the skills and resources to distort reality making it difficult for the medical community to overcome.  Most of the anti-wind evidence is based on personal stories without medical certification or judicial review.  Also myths and mischief Information are provided by vested interests.

Front organizations such as Wind Concerns Ontario and Ontario Wind Resistance spread misleading stories and faux facts about wind turbines that scares people in the manner of a flu or small pox epidemic.  Other social scares have been created for cell phone, WIFI, wireless phone towers, high-voltage power lines, fluoridated water and vaccinations to which the same illnesses such as headaches and sleep deprivation are attributed.  The medical community has not been able to find any linkage causing human adverse health.  Studies have shown that attributed symptoms continue as long as the sufferer believes they are exposed to the source even when the source no longer exists.  This is known as psychogenic illnesses, otherwise known as the nocebo effect - belief that something causes real harm- and is the opposite to a placebo.

Some Ontario residents are suffering genuine health symptoms but the source of these symptoms should not be attributed to wind turbines.  Possibly these illnesses are caused by the extreme hype of the anti-wind organizations that spread misinformation and bully citizens at public meetings.  It is the misinformation from vested interests that causes harm, not wind turbines.  The syndrome is mainly a communicated disease causing medical panic related to either hysteria or NIMBY-ism.

Haidt’s ‘The Righteous Mind’ helps to understand the anti-wind political aspects and how balanced information can help the wind industry to proceed with the their environment friendly and cost effective energy programs.  Ontario residents are foolish to be consumed by fear of hypothetical harm from the supposed health effects of living next to wind farms.

Can Wind Turbines Make You Sick?

Here's a great summary of the latest wind news from The Slate. It's full of useful hyperlinks to the original sources.

Wind turbines near Palm Springs, Calif.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

A new syndrome appears to be highly contagious.

By Keith Kloor|Posted Wednesday, March 20, 2013, at 1:17 PM

In the past several years, scores of people living near wind farms have claimed to have been sickened by noise from the rotating blades. They have complained of everything from headaches and depression to conjunctivitis and nosebleeds. Is “wind turbine syndrome” real? Is it just another imaginary illness stoked by loons on the Internet? Are the victims a bunch of fakers?

Noisy environments can be irritating and sleep-disrupting. But advocates of the new syndrome (which is not medically recognized) say that wind turbines pose specific dangers. They claim that exposure to wind farms’ low-frequency noise, even vibrations below the threshold of human hearing, is having dangerous physiological effects.

Several recent studies might explain what’s going on here. One of them, published in Health Psychology, found that the power of suggestion can induce symptoms associated with wind turbine syndrome. Researchers exposed 60 participants to 10 minutes of infrasound (vibrations too low in frequency to hear) and sham infrasound (that is, silence). Before the listening sessions, half the group was shown television footage of people who lived near wind farms recounting the harmful effects they said were caused by noise from the spinning blades. Within this group, the people who scored high on a test of anxiety became symptomatic whether they were exposed to low-frequency noise or sham infrasound.

As one of the authors of the study points out, this appears to be a classic case of the nocebo effect. It’s the evil twin of the placebo effect, which is often a pain-alleviating response to a sham pill or treatment. Nocebo effects are harmful symptoms that arise from negative information. For example, some participants in medical trials who are warned of potential adverse side effects experience precisely those side effects, even though they’re really taking a phony medication. The nocebo effect is psychogenic, a case of the mind making the body sick.

Several factors appear to be contributing to the sudden onset of medical problems attributed to wind turbines. A study released last week from the University of Sydney found that most of the health complaints about wind turbines came from an area of Australia where an organized anti-wind movement has been publicizing health concerns since 2009. (Coincidentally, the term wind turbine syndrome was coined in 2009 as the title of a self-published book.) "Health complaints were as rare as proverbial rocking horse droppings until the scare-mongering groups began megaphoning their apocalyptic, scary messages to rural residents," says study author Simon Chapman. As he pointed out to the Guardian: "If wind farms were intrinsically unhealthy or dangerous in some way, we would expect to see complaints applying to all of them, but in fact there is a large number where there have been no complaints at all."

And yet, the number of health problems attributed to wind turbines seems to multiply by the day, according to a compendium that Chapman maintains. His list now tops more than 200 maladies, which leads him to ask sardonically if there has ever been a bigger threat to humanity.

The epidemic also attests to the power of modern media, especially those outlets that have hyped anecdotal claims of wind turbine syndrome. A study published late last year in Health, Risk & Society calls this the "fright factor." Researchers surveying newspaper coverage of wind power in Ontario, Canada, between 2007 and 2011 found that many articles focused on “environmental risks and human health” concerns. It turns out that the press may be just as responsible as anti-wind activists for triggering the nocebo effect in those who believe they have fallen ill from wind turbines.

That jibes with a finding from a study published earlier this month in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research that asked in its title, "Are media warnings about the adverse effects of modern life self-fulfilling?" The study addressed another supposed danger—electromagnetic fields from Wi-Fi signals—that also has the power to evoke a nocebo response. As in the wind turbine study, participants watched a TV report of people claiming that Wi-Fi signals had caused them to fall ill. Researchers exposed participants to sham Wi-Fi signals and found that a number of the people (once again, those who were already identified as having an anxious personality) exhibited symptoms such as stomach pain and headaches.

Reports on the supposed dangers of electromagnetic fields from cellphone towers and overhead power lines have been circulating in the media for years. The roots of EMF hysteria in the United States can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s and the work of a crusading journalist who published stories in The New Yorker under the heading “Annals of Radiation.” People have attributed a myriad of illnesses to EMF, particularly neurological disorders and brain tumors. But after many millions of dollars of peer-reviewed research in the past few decades, there is no credible scientific evidence for such claims.

Still, concerns are so persistent globally that the World Health Organization (WHO) has looked comprehensively into the matter, concluding: "Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals. Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low-level electromagnetic fields."

In the United States, paranoia over EMF seems to have died down in recent years, though there are plenty of dead-enders who still flog the issue. Those who might have been inclined to fret about the danger of power lines may now instead be focusing their fears on cellphones. (This subset of chronic worriers should know that everything gives you cancer.)

Meanwhile, people living near wind farms, including a number of residents in one Massachusetts community, say they are experiencing headaches, insomnia, ringing in the ears, and other symptoms. It’s impossible to know whether they are extra-sensitive to low-frequency noise, would have had insomnia and headaches wherever they live, or are psychologically predisposed to react badly to negative information on wind turbines. For the time being, perhaps Stephen Colbert's take on wind turbine syndrome as a "communicated disease" seems the best explanation. Here's hoping this article doesn't spread it any further.

More noise from Nissenbaum

The following is a post on www.quora.com by Mike Barnard.  It is referring to a recent paper by Nissenbaum, et al in the journal Noise and Health. The question being asked on Quora is  "How reliable is this study?".

Summary:  Its reliability is very low.  This is a flawed and misleadingly titled study by long-time anti-wind lobbyists.

• It mistakes correlation for causation, and overstates correlation
• It downplays or ignores long-understood impacts of both bias and impacts of change in creating annoyance
• There are significant unstated conflicts-of-interest, biases and allegiances to an anti-wind lobbyist group among the six authors and reviewers
• One of the authors has been actively involved in creating anti-wind bias and annoyance in these sites for years
• It should be considered against the 17 major world-wide reviews to date which have found no health impacts from wind generation.

1. The study overstates causation and correlation, and understates the impact of bias of the studied groups.
   
   a.  Nissenbaum et al are overstating the strength of the correlation that their data shows. In contrast to the conclusions, figures 1 and 2 show a very weak dose-response, if there is one at all. The near horizontal 'curve fits' and large amount of data scatter are indications of the weak relationship between sleep quality and turbine distance. The authors seem to use a low p-value as support for the hypothesis that sleep disturbance is related to turbine distance. A better interpretation of the p-value related to a near horizontal line fit would be that it suggests a high probability of a weak dose response. Correlation coefficients are not given but should have been to indicate the quality of the curve fits. Intrinsik points out an additional failing of the report:
   

   Although there was a statistically significant difference between the mean PSQI scores in the near (7.8) and far group (6.0), it is important to remember that both of these average scores are greater than 5, which would qualify both groups as “poor sleepers”. When one examines the reported “% of PSQI score >5” no statistical difference between the near and far groups was found (p=0.0745).

   
   b. As the Intrinsik assessment points out:
   

   Given that the relationship between noise from wind turbines and health concerns is the fundamental premise of the study by Nissenbaum et al., it is surprising that the authors gave such little consideration to collection of actual sound data measurements at the study participant homes. The use of post-hoc sound data, visually obtained from figures in reports, is not scientifically defensible and should not have been used to draw conclusions about the findings of the questionnaires with distance from turbine locations. [16]

   
   c. Intrinsik also points out the misleading title of the study, another case of overstating conclusions available from the data:
   

   We also believe that the title of the paper “Effects of industrial wind turbine noise on sleep and health” is not supported given the nature of the data presented. No evidence with respect to sound level (noise) and its effect on sleep and health has been presented in this paper  [16]

   
   Given that the authors themselves admit that they can't construct a dose-response curve, their conclusion that wind farms affect sleep is surprising:
   

   In their paper Nissenbaum et al. state that noise emitted by IWTs can affect sleep. However, their results do not support this statement. In fact, the authors state that “The data on measured and estimated noise levels were not adequate to construct a dose-response curve...” and no statistical analyses were conducted to assess this supposed relationship. Therefore, we do not believe that Nissenbaum et al. (2012) show any statistical difference in overall “poor” sleep quality or sleepiness between the groups. [16]

   
   d.  The studied communities, via agitators such as Nissenbaum, have developed strong negative attitudes to wind farms.  As this study shows, this is a much better predictor of the effects Nissenbaum is claiming than any actual noise from wind farms. [4]  
   
   Intrinsik goes further and asserts the conclusion that the authors, if unbiased, would have found from the data, that the study groups were annoyed by changes in their environment and self-reported health impacts arose from annoyance with the change:
   
   

   The authors pointed out that visual cue and attitude towards wind turbines“are known to affect the psychological response to environmental noise”.While this may be true, visual cue and attitude by themselves have been shown to be stronger drivers of psychological responses than a wind-turbine specific variable like sound itself (e.g., Pedersen 2004). Therefore, a conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that the self-reported health effects of people living near wind turbines can be likely attributable to physical manifestations from an annoyed state, rather than a wind-turbine specific factor like noise. Indeed, the weight of evidence in the wind turbine and human health literature points to a causal relationship between self-reported health effects and annoyance, which is to say annoyance brought on by the change in the local environment(i.e., a decrease in amenity) that wind turbines represent (Knopper and Ollson 2011). [16]

   
   e.  The authors' treatment of bias is poor, stating without evidence that accounting for selection and reporting bias would make their conclusions stronger, not weaker.
   
   f.  The sample size is small as is the control group (many studies have small sample sizes; this makes this less authoritative, not worthless in and of itself.)
   
2. The study group has undisclosed biases influenced by one of the authors.
   
   This is not Nissenbaum's first study of the Mars Hill or the Vinalhaven wind farms.  He ran studies there in 2010 and 2011 as well, using a format pioneered by anti-wind folks in the UK and then by Nina Pierpont, creator of Wind Turbine Syndrome. [3], [9] The a-scientific studies are so poorly constructed that they are guaranteed to make people ascribe new symptoms to wind turbines, and to take completely ignored minor symptoms and turn them into major complaints. These studies have pre-loaded the biases of these study groups, making it difficult to accept the the conclusions of this better structured study.  The data this study is based upon is not new data, but data that was obtained several years ago that has been presented at the ICBEN conference in London (UK) over a year ago and has been presented as part of anti-wind farm submissions, which is not unusual, but the data and the conclusions Nissenbaum et al have been putting forward has been strongly criticized in the past. [10] For example, a 2012 Massachusetts expert panel had this to say about the conclusions:
   

   details of how homes were identified, how many homes/people were approached, and differences between those who did and did not participate are important to know. Without this, attributing any of the observed associations to the wind turbines (either noise from them or the sight of them) is premature. [16]

3. The authors' pre-existing bias is not disclosed or accounted for.
   
   Jeffery Aramini is the person most often interviewed in newspaper reports but the study is co-authored with Michael Nissenbaum and Christopher Hanning.  
   
   a. Aramini has maintained a lower profile than Nissenbaum and Hanning, but is on the Advisory Group of an anti-wind lobbyist group, Wind Vigilance. [11]  
   b. Nissenbaum is a long-time anti-wind activist and also a member of the Advisory Group of Wind Vigilance. [1] 
   c. Hanning is a long-time anti-wind activist as well, who has been writing anti-wind papers that have not been able to get into even low-impact, peer-reviewed journals and is also on the Advisory Group of Wind Vigilance.[2] [12] 
   
   Fronting with the lower profile Aramini in newspaper interviews appears to be a convenient way to disguise the deep and long-standing bias of the authors.
   
   The authorial bias can easily be detected by the inappropriate use of the emotionally laden "industrial wind turbine", a term which was selected and focussed grouped by anti-wind lobbying organizations associated with the Koch Brothers.[14]  Neutral language includes "wind turbine" and "wind turbine generator". 
   
4. The thanked reviewers have unstated biases and conflicts-of-interest as they are paid anti-wind experts who have a long history of directly testifying against wind energy.
   
   a. Carl Phillips is relatively new to this group, having been asked to leave his post at an Alberta university for taking tobacco industry money and remarkably finding that tobacco products were much less harmful than people thought.[6]  He has found a new source of funds in anti-wind lobbying.  As he says on his blog, Ep-Ology:
   

   I knew what answer I was going to present from the start. So when I wrote my COI [conflict of interest] statement, I did not hesitate to describe, matter-of-fact, that I do work as a testifying expert on behalf of communities fighting the siting of local wind turbines.

   b. Rand not only testifies, his firm gains revenue from measuring sound near wind farms for complainants and to assist litigation. [7]  Rand, in any event, 
   c. James has been testifying for fee against wind farms since 2006.[8]  
   
   Phillips and James are both members of the Advisory Group of Wind Vigilance as well.  The three thanked are bolstering their court room pitches, and cannot be considered credible unbiased assessors. If they are the only peer reviewers, this is grounds for retraction. As their conflicts and pre-existing biases are unstated, this too is grounds for serious concern.
   
5. Noise and Health is a rarely referenced journal of low impact.
   
   The journal, Noise and Health has a very low impact index of 1.2, meaning that few researchers reference their studies; there can be a variety of reasons for this including poor quality or trivial papers. [5]  The journal may not have sought independent reviewers who would have pointed out the flaws in the article, but may have accepted the reviewers that came with the article as suggestions.  If the journal did not gain separate review, this is a reason for retraction in and of itself.
   
6. Wind Vigilance, on whose Advisory Group five of six authors and reviewers sit, has been promoting wind health issues in the absence of peer-reviewed evidence and against 17 major studies' findings for years. 
   
   As Wind Vigilance is a central theme to this, it would be useful to understand their positions and the degree of evidence behind them:
   
   

   Based on a review of the evidence, the Society for Wind Vigilance is satisfied that there is a significant probability of adverse health effects for human subjects living within 2.0 km of land based industrial wind turbines. The Society for Wind Vigilance recognizes the urgent need for further human health research to finalize guidelines for siting and noise levels that will protect human health. In the interim the Society for Wind Vigilance recommends that land based industrial wind turbines be sited a minimum of 2 km from the property line of non participating residents. Distances greater than 2 km will typically be required for special terrain such as turbines on ridges and offshore turbines. [13]

   
   Bolding is mine to indicate statements which require elaboration:
   1. This statement was released April 2012, six months before the first peer-reviewed paper that found any issues with wind energy and health was published.  In the meantime, 17 major reviews by independent and credible organizations worldwide of thousands of pieces of peer-reviewed research found no issue with wind energy and human health.  On what grounds did Wind Vigilance make the assessment that all of the other studies and the vast majority of medical, engineering and acoustic professionals were wrong?  On what grounds did they decide on 2 kilometers?
   2. "Industrial wind turbines" is the preferred emotive phrasing of anti-wind lobbyists.  It is not neutral language in this discussion, just as "wind farms" is the preferred emotive language of pro-wind advocates (including me).  This language was created by lobbying organizations associated with the Koch Brothers and other astroturf funding undiversified fossil fuel organizations.[14]
   3. The reasoning behind greater setbacks on ridges and lakes is not explained, but given the weakness of the rest of their position, it can only be to ensure that wind turbines will never be seen or heard.  Obviously this is an extreme and foolish position.
   
   That five of six authors and reviewers of this paper are so tightly associated with an organization with such a strong and strident opposition to evidence-based siting guidelines and wind energy in general is indicative.  That they do not make clear their association, their long-standing bias and their conflicts-of-interest is also indicative.
   
7. 17 major reviews have found no health impacts from wind energy
   
   This single paper must be contrasted to the 17 (to-date) major reviews world-wide of hundreds or thousands of peer-reviewed articles related to wind energy, health and noise which have found no health impacts.  All studies agree that a small subset of people very close to wind farms find the noise annoying. [15]  The best consensus is that the vast majority of health complaints attributed to wind energy are the result of a psychogenic or communicated psychosomatic illness; people are making themselves sick when they are told that they will get sick. [15]

Full disclosure. This assessment was developed with the assistance of:

• Dr. David Perry -- Dr. Perry holds degrees in electrical engineering and neuroscience from The University of Melbourne and a PhD from the Bionics Institute examining how sound stimulation from a cochlear implant is represented in the brain. Dr. Perry is also on the Board of Directors of community-owned wind project Hepburn Wind in Australia.
• Richard Mackie - Mr. Mackie is an Engineer with degrees from the University of Auckland and the Australian Graduate School of Management. He is Managing Director of Advanced Energy Consulting (Australia) which does work related to wind energy projects.
• The Intrinsik professional assessment upon which some of the comments are based was funded by CanWEA (Canadian Wind Energy Association).

References:
[1] Dr. Michael A. Nissenbaum - The Society for Wind Vigilance (windvigilance.com)
[2] http://docs.wind-watch.org/Hanni...
[3] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&r...
[4] http://www.sciencedirect.com/sci...
[5] Journal and Academic Rankings (sciencegateway.org)
[6] Tobacco researcher leaves U of A (cbc.ca)
[7] Wind Turbines: Published Articles (randacoustics.com)
[8] Mike Barnard's answer to Wind Power: Is Dr. Nina Pierpoint's "Wind Turbine Syndrome" a real medical syndrome caused by wind turbines?
[9] http://www.windaction.org/documents/33057 (wind-watch.org)
[10] http://www.ert.gov.on.ca/files/2...
[11] Jeff Aramini, DVM, MSC, PHD - The Society for Wind Vigilance(windvigilance.com)
[12] Dr Chris Hanning - The Society for Wind Vigilance (windvigilance.com)
[13] News - The Society for Wind Vigilance (windvigilance.com)
[14] Turbine foes try to forge national opposition movement (eenews.net)
[15] Wind Power: What might cause people who live near wind turbines to get sick?
[16] http://www.canwea.ca/pdf/Intrins...

Additional references:
[1] Additional background on the authors and the nature of the preceding studies performed by Mr. Nissenbaum here:  A Vet, A Radiologist, And An Anaesthetist Walk Into A Scientific Controversy... (blogspot.ca)
[3] Nissenbaum paper recycles claims on wind energy and health already found inadequate by courts and expert panel (canwea.ca)

Doctors support turbines, criticize fossil, nuclear options

Orangeville Citizen

August 09, 2012

By WES KELLER

Freelance Reporter

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) is describing Health Canada’s study of health impacts from wind turbines as “superfluous (and) a waste of time and a waste of public funds.”

“It’s curious Health Canada has taken an interest in studying the health impacts of something as benign as wind energy when for years health and environment experts have been cautioning about the negative impacts of fossil fuels on human health,” Farrah Khan of CAPE says.

CAPE says a 2010 Ontario study “reviewed 40 years of scientific research on wind turbines and human health.”

It noted that the report by Chief Medical Officer Arlene King report concluded that “the scientific evidence available to date does not demonstrate a direct causal link between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects.”

“She also found that ‘community engagement at the outset of planning for wind turbines is important and may alleviate health concerns about wind farms.’ This puts any physiological impact from the very ordinary sound of a windmill into serious doubt.”

Community involvement was at the heart of the plan for what has become Dufferin Wind Power, originally totally owned by a group of Melancthon farmers and 401 Energy of Markham but now owned largely by a Chinese company.

Much of the criticism levelled by opponents of that development centres on foreign ownership, but the alleged health impacts haven’t been forgotten. Persons affected say they are genuinely ill since the advent of other wind farms in the area.

A question asked at a recent information meeting was, in effect, “If the turbines didn’t cause the illness, why did we become ill after they went into operation?”

A multi-disciplinary study commissioned by the Canadian and American wind energy associations recently found that the most serious effect on nearby residents was “annoyance.” And the degree of annoyance was related to how the person felt about turbines prior to development.

On the other hand, according to CAPE, “Canada’s health community is shocked at the growing evidence of illness connected to the fossil fuels industry. In 2009, the Alberta Cancer Board reported cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan, downstream from the tar sands, were 30 per cent higher than expected.”

CAPE quotes the Ontario Clean Air Alliance as saying that in 2009, coal plants in the province “were connected to 246 deaths, 342 hospital admissions, 406 costly emergency room visits and almost 123,000 illnesses such as asthma attacks.”

While turbine health impacts continue to be debated, CAPE says the health impacts of coal are a certainty.

It is also critical of the health risks posed by nuclear radioactive waste. “Spent fuel remains highly toxic and radioactive for thousands of years. But nuclear reactors, even in their normal day-to-day operations, emit radiation. A 2008 German government study found an elevated risk of leukemia for children living within five kilometres of the country’s 16 nuclear plants.”

Although preferring wind energy, CAPE acknowledges that any form of energy production inevitably has some negative impact on the plane, noting that wind turbines are not perfect, generate some sound and their appearance is not pleasing to everyone.

“But coal-fired generating stations, nuclear power plants and the tar sands all contribute to serious illness.

“We’re comparing a minor annoyance from the sound of blowing wind to the severity of cancer, asthma and brain damage. Our energy choices do impact our health and renewables like wind are our safest bets,” CAPE concludes.

Do wind turbines really make people ill?

Wind Concerns Ontario (WCO), a coalition of groups opposed to wind turbines, has been telling us for months that noise from wind turbines makes people ill.

They’ve even conducted a form of health survey of people near wind turbines in an attempt to prove their point; and claim that 86 out of 112 of respondents are “reporting adverse health affects due to industrial wind turbines”.

Wind Concerns Ontario tells us that the health issues caused by wind turbines are so significant and clear that there should be a moratorium on wind turbine construction and that turbines should be set back at least 1.5 kilometres from places where people live or spend significant time. 

Effectively this would end any wind development in southern Ontario where we need clean, renewable power generation. 

However, an analysis of the Wind Concerns Ontario data reveals that if those 112 people had been picked at random from the same age groups who do not live anywhere near wind turbines; they would essentially exhibit the same symptoms.

The complete analysis can be found at www.windisgood.ca but the chart below compares the prevalence of the symptoms claimed by the Wind Concerns Ontario sample of 112 people with those identified for the general population.  In eight out of nine symptoms the proportion of people reporting the symptom is statistically the same as the general population.  In the other one, the WCO respondents have a higher prevalence of tinnitus.  This may be explained by the older age profile of the respondents.

Prevalence (percent of total)

Symptom	WCO Survey	Population Max	Population Min
Excessive tiredness	50	49	32
Sleep disturbance	48	49	32
Stress	44	43	27
Headache	38	42	36
Tinnitus	34	20	15
Anxiety	29	50	15
Other	25	-	-
Depression	21	30	20
Hearing problems	20	23	15
Palpitations	19	25	15
Migraines	9	8	6

The prevalence of symptoms in the general population is based on an extensive review of the scientific literature.  Based on recommendations by University of Toronto physician-epidemiologist, Cornelia Baines, and University of Toronto physician-medical biochemist, Andrew Baines, the comparisons were based on data reported in Statistic Canada’s Canadian National Population Health Survey, the U.S. National Health Interview Survey and over fifteen other peer reviewed journals.

The analysis establishes that Wind Concerns Ontario’s survey does not show that wind turbines make people ill. This is confirmed by  two epidemiological studies in Europe in the last seven years plus numerous academic analyses on the subject. None have found any adverse health effects from turbine noise other than annoyance that some people feel towards turbines. 

Probably annoyance can cause sleeplessness and headaches if it is intense enough but according to the Chatham-Kent public health department quoted in the Star’s editorial on August 3^rd 2009, “…opposition to wind farms on the basis of potential adverse health consequences is not justified by the evidence."

Certainly Wind Concerns Ontario survey does not justify a moratorium on wind turbine construction or a change in the setbacks and the standards for wind turbines in Ontario. 

Wind turbine syndrome: a classic ‘communicated’ disease

• 
  

The Conversation

20 July 2012, 6.09am AEST

The original article appeared here.

AUTHOR

1. Simon Chapman
   Professor of Public Health at University of Sydney 

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Simon Chapman currently receives funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council for three project grants, and one capacity building grant. He receives no funding from any wind energy company or agents acting on their behalf.

ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR

24 May 2011

The evidence is in – plain cigarette packs turn young smokers off

23 May 2011

A licensing scheme to make smokers butt out for good

At the beginning of this year I started collecting examples of health problems some people were attributing to wind turbine exposure. I had noticed a growing number of such claims on the internet and was curious about how many I could find. Within an hour or two I had found nearly 50 and today the number has grown to an astonishing 155.

I have worked in public health on three continents since the mid 1970s. In all this time, I have never encountered anything in the history of disease that is said to cause even a fraction of the list of problems I have collected.

The list of 155 problems includes “deaths, many deaths”, none of which have ever been brought to the attention of a coroner. It includes several types of cancer, and both losing weight and gaining weight. You name it. Haemorrhoids have not yet been named, but nothing would surprise me.

Many of the problems are those which affect large proportions of any community: hypertension (high blood pressure); mental health problems; sleeping difficulties; sensory problems (eyes, hearing, balance); and learning and concentration difficulties. Every day in Australia many hundreds of Australians receive their first diagnosis with these problems, and most live nowhere near wind farms.

So is it reasonable to suggest that all these problems – or even a fraction of them – are caused by wind turbines? Wind farm opponents repeatedly argue that turbines cause both rapid and long-gestation health problems. It is common to read accounts of people having been adversely affected within hours or even minutes of being exposed. If this was true, there is a big problem here.

Wind farms have existed in Australia long before the first claims about health ever surfaced. The Ten Mile Lagoon wind farm near Esperance, Western Australia has been operational for 19 years. Victoria’s first, the Codrington wind farm, just celebrated its 11th birthday, and has 14 turbines each capable of producing 1.3 megawatts. And yet health complaints are relatively recent, with the few in Codrington post-dating a visit to the area by a vocal opponent, spreading anxiety.

In this sense, “wind turbine syndrome” (which incidentally produces zero returns from the United States National Library of Medicine’s 23 million research papers) is what we can call a “communicated” disease: it spreads via the nocebo effect by being talked about, and is thereby a strong candidate for being defined as a psychogenic condition.

One prominent opponent of wind farms says he can hear them 35km away. Others talk about electricity from the turbines “leaking” into the soil and causing deaths of hundreds of cattle and goats. Such catastrophic events would always attract huge news attention. But try to find such coverage and instead you will only find website anecdotes about what happened on a neighbour’s farm.

Opponents also say that only “susceptible” people are adversely affected by wind turbines. But they repeatedly say animals such as sheep, cattle, dogs and poultry are badly affected, with problems such as malformations, sudden death, sterility and yolkless eggs being common.

Against this, on any trip to a wind farm region, one can find thousands of livestock grazing contentedly around the turbines. In Tasmania there is a poultry farm with a wind turbine at the front gate. Is the argument now that only some animals are “susceptible” too?

There have now been 17 reviews of the available evidence about wind farms and health, published internationally. These are reviews of all studies, not single pieces of research. Each of these reviews have concluded that wind turbines can annoy a minority of people in their vicinity, but that there is no strong evidence that they make people ill.

The reviews conclude that pre-existing negative attitudes to wind farms are generally stronger predictors of annoyance than residential distance to the turbines or recorded levels of noise. In other words, people who don’t like wind farms can often be annoyed and worried by them: some might even worry themselves sick.

There are two main anti-wind farm groups in Australia busily fomenting anxiety and opposition. One is the Waubra Foundation, a group of mainly wealthy individuals, none of whom live in or near the town of Waubra, near Ballarat. Several of them, NIMBY style, have opposed turbines near their own properties elsewhere. They are led by an unregistered doctor, Sarah Laurie, and a wealthy mining investor, Peter Mitchell who also has connections to the Landscape Guardians. Despite their name, the Guardians have never attempted to guard our landscape from over-zealous residential developers, open cut coal or coal seam gas mining. They only target wind farm developments. All three – Waubra, the Guardians and Mitchell’s mining investment company share a South Melbourne post office box.

Problems of falling and stagnant real estate prices in many of Australia’s rural areas are well known. When landowners with property that would be hard to sell see a wealthy energy company moving into an area and investing millions in turbines, it’s not difficult to predict that some will see potential in being “bought out” by such companies. Mining companies do it regularly. When this has happened in some communities, word spreads fast. I have been given accounts of lavish renovation and relocation “shopping list” demands that have been given to some wind energy companies by hopeful complainants.

Tellingly, four allegedly unlivable houses near Waubra where complaining residents were bought out now house non-complaining occupants.

When anti-wind farm leaders move around communities, sometimes with entrepreneurial lawyers, spreading anxiety that the turbines can harm heath, we can get a potent combination of poorly informed, worried and angry residents seeded with the idea that their protests might lead to a payout.

Other complainants appear to see the turbines as symbols of values and movements that they despise: totems of green politics, modernity and the urban artifice.

Almost daily, I receive heated email suggesting I should host a turbine in my inner city backyard. The irony is that for 22 years I’ve lived 300m under the main flight path into Sydney airport, 30 metres from a busy road and 200m from a railway line where the combined noise is incomparably louder than hundreds of wind turbines. I rather think I wear my fair share of community noise. But some in the bush believe that unlike city dwellers, it is their birthright to be sheltered from any intrusion in their pristine surrounds, the ultimate in NIMBYism.

Fortunately, anti-wind farm voices in the bush are in a small minority, as this CSIRO study shows.