Wind farms and health: who is fomenting community anxieties?

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 7 November 2011 195 9 495-495 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2011 www.mja.com.au Personal Perspective nature of this phenomenon appears to parallel recent find about complaints and “illness” said to be generated by exposure to mobile phone base stations and powerlines.5 The recent rise of omplaints appears to be closely associated ith dvocacy from anti-wind-farm interest gro such as the Waubra Foundation. Future research will need test for temporal associations between this Foundation’s publicity and its movement through rural communities, a ind ha ga 120000 wind t W farms are a main component of efforts to rness renewable energy and reduce greenhouse s emissions. Globally, there are an estimated urbines, and this number is increasing rapidly, with China, the United States, Germany, Spain and India being the largest wind energy producers. Commercial wind farms began operating more than 20 years ago, but claims that they directly cause illness (often rapid, acute effects from even single exposures) are far more recent. Together, these observations indicate sociogenic dimensions to this latest example of anxieties about modern technology. Anti-wind-farm websites reveal an everexpanding and often bizarre array of self-reported symptoms — tellingly never raised by landowners who earn income by hosting turbines, but rather by neighbours with land unsuitable for hosting turbines and by people with prior histories of opposition to wind farms. It has long been observed that envy of neighbours’ turbine-hosting incomes, beliefs that turbines are ugly with no local community benefit, preference for pristine bucolic environments and NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard-ism) all predict complaints.1,2 These diverse symptoms are lumped together as “wind turbine syndrome”, a popularised catch-all term that yields zero returns from searches of the research literature in PubMed or Web of Science. The most recent review of published evidence concluded (consistent with four previous reviews) that health effects among some living near wind turbines “are more likely attributed to physical manifestation from an annoyed state than from wind turbines themselves”.3 In other words, anger about or fear of turbines can make people sick. Another review of health effects of inaudible low frequency infrasound, regularly demonised by anti-wind-farm activists as silently noxious, concluded “There is no consistent evidence of any physiological or behavioural effect of acute exposure to infrasound in humans”.4 The psychogenic and sociogenic ings