Wind turbine syndrome: who’s doing the research?
- 24 Oct 2012, 17:00
- Ros Donald
Photo: Martin Pettitt
Are people getting sick because they live near wind turbines?
Opponents to windfarms have been collecting testimonies alleging
that communities near wind developments have been suffering a
clutch of symptoms they're calling 'wind turbine syndrome'. But
although studies that appear to support these allegations have
started appearing in journals, the medical community remains
skeptical that the evidence base proves the claims. We've taken a
closer look.
Ever since a 64-foot wind turbine was erected just 300 metres from
Aileen Jackson's home, family members have experienced ill health
and sleepless nights, depression, rocketing blood sugar levels and
high blood pressure. So claims skeptic columnist James Delingpole
in an article for the
Daily Mail. Delingpole thinks the link between the Jackson
family's ill-health and the turbine can't be a coincidence. He
says:
"[I]n order to believe that, you would
have to discount the testimony of the thousands of people just like
Aileen around the world who claim their health has been damaged by
wind farms."
These testimonies, often collected by anti-wind campaigners, are
now being cited in journal articles - mostly opinion pieces -
claiming there may indeed be a wind
turbine syndrome. There's an opinion piece
in the British Medical Journal by sleep medicine practitioners Alun
Evans and Chris Hanning, and the August 2011 theme edition of the
Bulletin of
Science, Technology and Society is given over to what it says
are the ill-effects of wind turbines on nearby communities.
According to these articles, the only suggested cure is to move
away from the structures.
Delingpole focuses on one article in particular in his piece:
'Properly
Interpreting the Epidemiologic Evidence About the Health Effects of
Industrial Wind Turbines on Nearby Residents' by Dr Carl
Phillips, an epidemiologist. The piece argues that testimonies from
people around the world offer "overwhelming evidence that wind
turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually
stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate".
Where wind and tobacco meet
Dr Phillips has
testified before US Congress on the reported health dangers of
living near wind turbines. He also
testifies before government agencies on behalf of communities
that hire him in wind development planning hearings as head of
epiphi Consulting Group, based in Texas, according to
testimony he gave in 2010.
In it, he writes:
"I admit to being new to this
controversy [...] But as someone who specializes in trying to sort
out competing epidemiology-related policy claims, I find it
difficult to see how the evidence could fail to be adequate to
suggest that there is a serious problem worthy of further
study."
Phillips has been working on the health effects of wind for a few
years, but he is a longer-established figure in debate over the
regulation and health implications of tobacco products. Until 2010,
Phillips was an assistant professor at the University of Alberta,
where he focused on so-called tobacco harm reduction, promoting
alternatives to cigaretts such as chewing tobacco and electronic
cigarettes.
In an interview
on a website selling electronic cigarettes in 2010, Phillips
said:
"The health benefits of switching [to
smokeless tobacco products] are almost exactly the same as the
health benefits of quitting, and this applies to electronic
cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and pharmaceutical nicotine."
He left the university shortly after the interview, after he
claims he was driven out as a result of "efforts to censor
[his] THR [tobacco harm reduction] research". According to a
local report, he had received a $1.5 million grant from the US
Smokeless Tobacco Company, which makes chewing tobacco.
Articles and opinion pieces Phillips published while at Alberta
include: 'Warning:
Anti-tobacco activism may be hazardous to epidemiological
science'.
Since 2010, Phillips hasn't been affiliated to any university. In
addition to running epiphi, he heads up an organisation called the
Populi Health Institute, which he calls an "independent
academic-style lab", which has received
funding from British American Tobacco. The institute doesn't
have a website, and Phillips appears to be its only full-time
employee. He also maintains the website, TobaccoHarmReduction,
which promotes smokeless nicotine products.
Wind and the power of testimony
Phillips's wind farm paper is not based on research into the
effect turbines have on health. As he
says on his blog, he "knew what answer [he was] going to
present from the start". Instead, he says
testimonies from people who claim their health is being
affected by wind turbines are "strong evidence for a causal
relationship" between proximity to the turbines and the symptoms
complainants describe.
Describing his methods, he says:
"It was completely intended to be
analytic, not research, arguing for a particular way of looking at
the evidence that wind turbines cause human health problems.
It is a research paper only in the sense that anything
analytic that appears in journals gets called that: 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.
I had written a paper that was designed from the start to
argue (sort of like demonstrating) how to think about the matter I
worked on."
Phillips argues these testimonies shouldn't be discounted
despite not being peer reviewed. He goes further, claiming that
peer review is used in the medical community to "censor politically
incorrect evidence".
Phillips acknowledges that researchers measuring noise from
turbines haven't found any physiological evidence that it harms
people. But he argues:
"Claims have been made that people
cannot usually detect the sounds or vibrations from wind turbines
at certain distances (e.g., Colby et al. 2009 address this point
multiple times and seem to imply it is of great importance), though
there are ample counterclaims about people being able to detect the
noise. The claims, whether or not they are accurate, have no
bearing on whether these exposures affect people's health and well
being. Many things we cannot detect can harm us."
Phillips claims that scientists' failure to detect noise at
harmful levels near wind turbines does not account for the fact
that people experience "complete relief" when they relocate.
What does the medical community say about exposure to wind
turbines?
All this might seem quite confusing. Phillips and others generally
blame audible and inaudible noise from wind turbines as the cause
of health problems. Yet, Phillips appears to accept that
researchers haven't found evidence that the sound from turbines is
harmful. According to a
recent literature review for the government of Massachusetts on
the health impacts of wind turbines, on an audible level, modern
turbines produce less than 40 decibels at distances greater than
400 metres away, which complies with
World Health Organisation guidelines. Turbines also produce
infrasound, but below the level at which it can be heard and felt,
according to the studies reviewed.
"Noise is the operative issue in [health] claims made about wind
turbines", says Dr Robert McCunney from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, an epidemiologist who sat on a panel for a
literature review of
health claims made about wind turbines on behalf of the wind
industry. Epidemiologists
study disease in populations, and it's not a simple process to make
a link between environmental factors and ill-health. As McCunney
tells Carbon Brief: "We're trained to consider a range of
explanations for findings noted in research studies."
According to this standard, do the testimonies of sufferers count
as "overwhelming evidence", as Phillips suggests, for wind turbine
syndrome? Plenty of people say they are are experiencing
discomfort. But several panels hired to assess the literature on
this subject agree that symptoms such as sleeplessness and anxiety
appear to correlate much more strongly with whether or not people
actually like wind turbines than with any other factor, which might
suggest something more complicated is happening.
The Massachusetts review says four studies have produced
peer-reviewed papers on the health effects of wind turbines - three
of which find that the most significant outcome associated with
poor health was that people surveyed don't like being around
turbines. Although turbine noise isn't judged to be harmful, some
people may still dislike the sound. And as environmental health research
shows, if people are around something such as a noise they don't
like for consistent periods - a state scientists rather prosaically
call annoyance - their health might suffer. In itself, annoyance
could be seen as an important impact on communities. Dr McCunney
says:
"There's no question that a small
percentage of people who live near turbines report annoyance. When
people are annoyed, they may experience stress."
Some
papers have suggested that people are more likely to feel
annoyed by the noise of wind turbines if they are already
poorly-disposed to the technology - for example, if they don't
like how turbines look. Conversely, some studies suggest that
people who benefit financially from hosting wind turbines nearby -
either through community schemes or from having turbines
on their land - are much less likely to report poor health as a
result of living near turbines. Another study says it could be even
simpler than that - "
community engagement" such as education and consultation during
the planning process may be enough to alleviate health
concerns.
Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at the University of
Sydney, focuses on the sociology of public health. He has compiled
a list of
peer-reviewed papers and literature reviews on wind turbines and
health, and is currently researching the incidence of health
complaints in the areas surrounding all of the windfarms in
Australia.
He told Carbon Brief the frequency and groupings of health
complaints to do with wind farms indicate a the claims may be
related to people's state of mind or social influences. He suggests
so-called wind turbine syndrome may actually be a "communicated
disease". He explains:
"Complaints about the health effects of
wind turbines appear only to have occurred in large numbers within
the past five years, even though the technology has been deployed
for over 20 years. And complaints only occur in certain areas,
while not at all in others. For example, you can see that in
Western Australia where there is a significant number of turbines,
there haven't been any complaints. Instead, the complaints occur in
New South Wales and Victoria, where anti-windfarm campaigners have
been more active."
If his study shows that's the case, anti-windfarm campaigning may,
perversely, be contributing to people's annoyance about wind farms,
and any ill-health this annoyance might cause.
But what of Phillips's claim that the volume of testimony suggests
there is something researchers are missing? Several reviews have
looked at collections of testimonies available on the internet as
well as studies published by researchers like Phillips - but they
doesn't share Phillips's view that self-reported data is enough to
suggest a link. For example, the Massachusetts study
says:
"Such descriptions can be informative in
describing phenomena and raising suggestions for possible follow-up
with more rigorous study designs, but generally are not considered
evidence for causality."
Chapman agrees:
"Hypotheses [about what's causing health
problems] start from patient observations. But then you have to set
up studies and ask questions, for example about whether these
self-reported testimonies about turbines should be taken at face
value."
While current studies appear to show sound from wind turbines
doesn't harm humans, peer-reviewed literature on wind turbines'
effect on community health is still thin on the ground. But does
that mean testimonies are able to provide "overwhelming evidence"
of a problem where scientists' measurements so far have failed?
With researchers suggesting a social element to 'wind turbine
syndrome', maybe that question is more complicated to answer than
it seems.
Carbon Brief contacted Carl Phillips and Christopher Hanning
for comment, but they did not respond.