The Logical Extension of Wind Turbine Syndrome

If you google Wind Turbine Syndrome, the first link will take you to a book by Nina Pierpont, an author with all sorts of impressive-looking medical credentials, who wastes no time in revealing “wind energy’s dirty little secret”:

Many people living within 2 km (1.25 miles) of these spinning giants get sick. So sick that they often abandon (as in, lock the door and leave) their homes. Nobody wants to buy their acoustically toxic homes. The “lucky ones” get quietly bought out by the wind developers—who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that Wind Turbine Syndrome exists. (And yet the wind developers thoughtfully include a confidentiality clause in the sales agreement, forbidding their victim from discussing the matter further.)

Is this really true? Last year, the UK’s Daily Mail claimed that thousands of people living near wind turbines have come down with an array of maladies (because of the whirring blades), from tinnitus and insomnia to depression and high blood pressure. The Daily Mail based its report on people it interviewed and this 2011 study.

It seems like we’re hearing more about this every week, connected perhaps to a growing anti-wind movement. But one researcher who has investigated “Wind Turbine Syndrome” says it is

a classic “communicated” disease: it spreads by being talked about, and is therefore a strong candidate for being defined as a psychogenic condition.

In other words, as I wrote here, it is a

phenomenon akin to mass hysteria—an outbreak of apparent health problems that has a psychological rather than physical basis.

Stephen Colbert had some fun with this a few months ago:

Now, Wind Turbine Syndrome might just seem like a collection of unrelated health complaints to the untrained eye. (By the way, untrained eye? Also a symptom of Wind Turbine Syndrome.) For the reason it seems that way is because it probably is. Several studies have concluded that there is no evidence of health effects from wind turbines. But just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it’s not contagious. Wind Turbine Syndrome is what we can call a communicated disease. It’s spread via the NOCEBO effect, by being talked about.

Others are treating Wind Turbine Syndrome with bit more seriousness. Earlier this week, three medical doctors published a study in the The Journal of Laryngology & Otology. It’s called

“Wind Turbine Syndrome”: Fact or Fiction?

On the one hand, the authors acknowledge:

There is an abundance of information available on the internet describing the possibility of wind turbine syndrome. However, the majority of this information is based on purely anecdotal evidence. Whilst it is biologically and physically plausible that low frequency noise generated by wind turbines could affect people, there is insufficient evidence on which to base conclusions.

Yet they conclude:

There is ample evidence of symptoms arising in individuals exposed to wind turbine noise. Some researchers maintain that the effects of wind turbine syndrome are clearly just examples of the well known stress effects of exposure to noise, as displayed by a small proportion of the population. However, there is an increasing body of evidence suggesting that infrasound and low frequency noise have physiological effects on the ear. Until these effects are fully understood, it is impossible to state conclusively that exposure to wind turbine noise does not cause any of the symptoms described. The effects of infrasound and low frequency noise require further investigation.

This suggests to me that the authors of the paper are playing it safe. They certainly don’t answer the question raised in the title of their paper. So I asked the lead author, Amir Farboud, an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist to clarify the takeaway finding in his paper. He responded, via email from Britain:

I think it’s important to recognise where we are with regards WTS (Wind Turbine Syndrome). Many groups  around the world are concerned about WTS, but currently this is not a recognised medical condition. The significance of our review is that this is the first time that anyone from the ENT community has come forward and published an article in a well established peer reviewed journal. This means that the scientific community is considering the possibility that there could be detrimental physiological effects of living near wind turbines.

Initially when investigating WTS, I was convinced that there was a nocebo effect as you suggested. However, the more we looked, the possibility that infrasound causing deleterious effects became apparent. We have come to learn two important things. 1. That infrasound can cause a stress type response in humans and potentially the symptoms of dizziness, tinnitus and even hearing loss. 2. Wind turbines produce infrasound. What we are not able to do is to stand up and confidently state unequivocally that the infrasound that wind turbines produce cause all the symptoms that aggrieved parties claim. This would require detailed controlled experiments, ideally with an animal model.

Since publishing the book in late 2009, Pierpont has heard from people around the world who are discovering that Wind Turbine Syndrome is not confined to living in the shadow of industrial wind turbines. It turns out people suffer identical symptoms from living close to natural gas compressor stations, industrial sewage pumping stations, industrial air conditioners, and other power plants. In each case, low frequency noise and infrasound appear to be the chief disease-causing culprit—basically, Wind Turbine Syndrome without the turbines.

It turns out that everybody gets to play. So no favorites!