How to catch 'wind turbine syndrome': by hearing about it and then worrying
Renewable energy is front and centre of global hopes of avoiding existential threats from climate change. Yet Australia has no commissioner for climate change, but we do have a windfarm commissioner. “Fake news” has long permeated popular understanding via factoids: unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. Social media has massively facilitated the contagion of factoids. Bogus statements passed around face-to-face social networks in the pre-digital era moved at glacial pace compared with the speed at which claims circulate today.
Windfarm anxiety is a recent entrant to the long history of new technology attracting attacks from those fearful of and hostile toward mephistophelian artifice that offends natural order. Linda Simon’s history of electricity, Dark Light. Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray notes that by the end of the first world war, 80% of US homes still had no electricity. Community anxiety about electricity was widespread, and reading by electric light was believed to cause “photo-electric opthalmia”
In 1879 the British Medical Journal reported that the newly popular telephone could cause “nervous excitability, with buzzing noises in the ear, giddiness, and neuralgic pains’’.
19th century American neurologist George Miller Beard argued the proliferation of a range of symptoms of nervousness were caused by “wireless telegraphy, science, steam power, newspapers and the education of women; in other words modern civilization”.
We’ve since had evidence-free public anxieties about televisions, electric blankets, microwave ovens, power lines, computers, WiFi, smart meters and solar panels. Apocalyptic predictions about mobile phones doing to brain cancer what smoking did to lung cancer came to nothing: the incidence of brain cancer has flat-lined for over thirty years while mobile phone use became almost universal.
My new book with Fiona Crichton, Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Communicated Disease, reviews why it is clear that adverse reactions to wind turbines are casebook examples of psychogenic illness which spread by exposure to negative publicity.
I’ve counted 247 different diseases and symptoms in humans and animals attributed by opponents to windfarms. These include lung cancer, skin cancer, haemorrhoids, gaining and losing weight and my favourite, disoriented echidnas. But most are classic symptoms of anxiety: things that can happen to you when you are very worried.
The nocebo effect, the evil twin sibling of the healing placebo effect, is documented in a vast research literature. When some people are exposed to frightening information about agents or exposures, expectancy effects just as powerful as placebo effects can operate to make people feel sick with worry or anxiety.
25 scientific reviews since 2003 have concluded there is very poor evidence for any claim that wind turbines are the direct cause of any disease. Rather, a herd of uncontested elephants in the room point unavoidably to a conclusion that “wind turbine syndrome” is a communicated disease: you catch it by hearing about it and then worrying.
We know that:
A few windfarms have a few residents who claim to be affected. The direct causation hypothesis would predict that all wind farms should affect some people.
The great majority of complaints occur in English-speaking nations, despite the proliferation of windfarms globally. A disease that only speaks English?
Farms targeted by opposition groups attract more complaints. Just six farms in Australia have had 74% of all complaints.
Those paid to host turbines rarely complain. The drug “money” may be a powerful preventive.
Claims about only “susceptible” individuals being affected (as with motion sickness), can’t explain why there are apparently no susceptible people in all of Western Australia or Tasmania with records of health complaints.
Experimental subjects randomised to view negative news footage about windfarm harms and then exposed to infrasound show that prior exposure to anxiety producing messages increases reporting of symptoms, even to sham infrasound.
And then there are the agitators. In 2011, Sarah Laurie from the Waubra Foundation told an Adelaide court that turbines can make people’s lips vibrate 10 kilometres away. That’s about from downtown Sydney to the suburb of Chatswood. She believes these vibrations are “sufficient to knock them off their feet or bring some men to their knees when out working in their paddock”. Mythbusters may find that an interesting claim.
Laurie also claims some Australians are “so exquisitely sensitised to certain frequencies that their perception of very, very low frequency” can “perceive an earthquake in Chile.” Chile is a mere 11,365 kilometres from our east coast.
Pharmacist George Papadopolous may be such a person. He claims that “the problem had dissipated when arriving at Young about 100km from the closest turbines”
Noel Dean, an Victorian objector once told an anti–windfarm meeting, “I’ve had my … mobile phone go into charge mode in the middle of the paddock, away from everywhere.” Apple and Samsung are apparently unconvinced.
Ann Gardner, perhaps Australia’s most prolific windfarm complainant, believes she is adversely affected by wind turbines even when they are switched off.
And New Zealander Bruce Rapley warned the 2015 Senate windfarm enquiry, “the health effects of wind turbines will eclipse the asbestos problem in the annals of history.” The WHO estimates that today 125 million are occupationally exposed to asbestos and about half of all occupational cancers are asbestos caused. No one has ever died from windfarm exposure.
This sort of claptrap is what passes for evidence in the confected “debate” that has now caused the Australian and two state parliaments to investigate windfarms five times between 2011 and 2015. The 2015 Senate enquiry was a travesty of science, failing to even mention the largest, most important longitudinal study run by Health Canada. This study provided no support for the direct cause hypothesis.
Windfarm opponents grasp straws that the evidence that wind turbines are dangerous is poor, and argue we need to invest in research that they just know will validate their concerns. There’s also “poor evidence” that UFOs, the Loch Ness monster and leprechauns exist, but no serious scientific body thinks investing research in such claims is sensible, other than the politically pressured NHMRC which in 2015 allocated $2.5mn into wind and health research.
Social panics over new technology have a natural history. Few now fear television sets and microwave ovens. They heyday of fearing cell phone towers came and went in the 1990s. Wind farm anxiety is now thankfully rapidly receding, with the desultory complaint volumes submitted to the Wind Commissioner showing the phenomenon has all but passed.
The delays this panic caused in driving Australian renewable energy harvesting were major. Our book’s final chapter explores the lessons in how we might avoid the next wave of “modern health worries”.
Simon Chapman AO is emeritus professor of Public Health at Sydney University
This is an edited version of the paper presented to the Royal Society of NSW and Four Academies Forum “The future of rationality in a posttruth world” at government house on 29 November