Kristen French covers “wind-farm syndrome”:
Those who believe in the syndrome say it’s caused by sound waves released when the giant turbine blades collide with the wind—not just the audible whooshing noise, but the rumbling vibrations created by a low-frequency sound, or infrasound. Nonbelievers, including most scientists and doctors, say it doesn’t exist, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not recognize it as a legitimate syndrome.
So what is causing the health issues?
Large-scale population surveys conducted by scientists in Sweden and the Netherlands have found that stress and sleep disturbances were more likely if the turbines were visible and less likely if the individuals benefitted economically from them. Other studies found that having a bad attitude about the turbines and subjective sensitivity to noise were more likely to lead to annoyance and negative health effects than actual exposure to audible sound or infrasound. (Back in 2007, three years before the Falmouth turbines were even built, a handful of residents expressed concern about the potential for illness after reading about symptoms online, and those health effects were even written up in the local newspaper.) And in recent lab tests, subjects who were told to expect side effects from infrasound ahead of time felt some of those symptoms even when they were exposed to sham infrasound.
Simon Chapman, an Australian professor of public health at the University of Sydney, believes wind-turbine syndrome is just the latest in a series of 21st-century technophobias (think of the well-publicized fears about microwave ovens, cell phones, cell towers, and Wi-Fi). “If wind farms genuinely did pose a problem to people who lived near them, you would expect to see a relationship which was fairly consistent from country to country, wind farm to wind farm,” Chapman says, “and that’s far from the case.” In Australia, the majority of complaints come from just six of the country’s 51 wind farms, according to his research. “The six wind farms where people have been getting sick are the ones where the anti-wind folks have been most active, with high-profile media attention amplifying the word-of-mouth stuff,” he says.
The Dish 