Wind Turbines and Health Disputes

A hot new dispute has one doctor claiming people that who live near wind turbines develop illnesses that disappear as soon as they move away. The wind industry quickly responded to debunk the claim, saying that nothing in the medical literature has identified such a unique claim. Actually, it's not that new of a dispute, having been a brewing controversy for about three years. A self-described country doctor, Dr. Nina Pierpont, who describes herself on her website as a country doctor and scientist who has spent much of her professional life caring for children, including those on Native American reservations, self-published her book this fall. She lives in northernmost New York, where utility scale wind turbines have started to appear in recent years.

She has a self-published book Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment. The "syndrome" has yet to be recognized by any medical authority, but Pierpont describes "sleep disturbance and deprivation, headache, ringing in ears, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, fast heart rate" and a host of other maladies caused by living too close to turbines. She proposes safe setbacks will be at least 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) and even longer for larger turbines, along with more studies and a moratorium on installations. Most zoning requires 1,000-foot setbacks from dwellings. "The sample size of 10 families/38 people was large enough for statistical significance with regard to susceptibility or risk factors," Pierpont states. Her website has letters and personal accounts of symptoms people complain of from the United Kingdom, Australia and other parts of the U.S.

American and Canadian trade groups didn't wait long to spring into action, releasing their own review of medical literature. The American Wind Energy and Canadian Wind Energy associations convened medical doctors, audiologists, and acoustical professionals from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to review peer-reviewed literature, specifically related to wind turbine sound. "There is no evidence that the sounds, nor the sub-audible vibrations, emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects on humans." said Dr. Robert J. McCunney, one of the authors of the study and an occupational/environmental medicine physician and research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The study said wind turbine noises are "not unique" and could not "plausibly have direct adverse physiological effects." and suggested "Some people may be annoyed at the presence of sound from wind turbines. Annoyance is not a pathological entity."

The associations point out that for 30 years, people have been living near the more than 50,000 wind turbines operating in Europe and the more than 30,000 in North America, with few people experiencing ill effects. But if wind turbines become as numerous as current projections suggest, it's a claim proponents will have to get used to confronting.

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