Ill Wind?

Windfarms have received a lot of bad press lately, with things like “wind turbine syndrome” and “vibro-acoustic disease” being bandied about. But can any illness actually be attributed to wind turbines? A study done in Australia, where such claims have been on the steady rise, has found that the majority of complaints come from people living near windfarms that have been aggressively targeted by groups that are opposed to the giant wind turbines simply because they do not like the look of them. In essence, the more these people were told that they should be having health issues from living near wind farms, the more they complained of health and noise problems. Before such attention from anti-windfarm activists the study found that health or noise complaints from people living near these same wind farms were exceedingly rare, despite the fact that the wind turbines had been operating there for several years. Researchers did point out that some people living near wind turbines will feel genuinely ill, but they are the exception, not the norm, and that few claims of adverse health effects from turbines have been reported in communities that benefit financially from local wind farms.