Documents > Noise, health > Carl V. Phillips - Properly Interpreting the Epidemiologic Evidence About the Health Effects of Industrial Wind Turbines on Nearby Residents

Properly Interpreting the Epidemiologic Evidence About the Health Effects of Industrial Wind Turbines on Nearby Residents

Carl V. Phillips

Populi Health Institute, Wayne, PA, USA, cvphilo@gmail.com

Abstract

There is overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder-type diseases, at a nontrivial rate. The bulk of the evidence takes the form of thousands of adverse event reports. There is also a small amount of systematically gathered data. The adverse event reports provide compelling evidence of the seriousness of the problems and of causation in this case because of their volume, the ease of observing exposure and outcome incidence, and case-crossover data. Proponents of turbines have sought to deny these problems by making a collection of contradictory claims including that the evidence does not “count,” the outcomes are not “real” diseases, the outcomes are the victims’ own fault, and that acoustical models cannot explain why there are health problems so the problems must not exist. These claims appeared to have swayed many nonexpert observers, though they are easily debunked. Moreover, though the failure of models to explain the observed problems does not deny the problems, it does mean that we do not know what, other than kilometers of distance, could sufficiently mitigate the effects. There has been no policy analysis that justifies imposing these effects on local residents. The attempts to deny the evidence cannot be seen as honest scientific disagreement and represent either gross incompetence or intentional bias.

It is important to note that:

• many cases of health effects go unreported because of sound easements (gag orders, non disclosure clauses) that wind developers get people to sign, for money, to keep them from complaining or speaking out.
• effects of noise, infra-sounds, vibrations and shadow flicker on wildlife are not reported in this special edition. It will take much time before independent studies are conducted on this. By then, it will be too late.

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The testimonies in the appendix are very sad to read.

Please distribute.
If you’re in a lawsuit, send it to your attorney.
If going to a hearing, bring it with you, summarise it and put it in as evidence.
Send it to your legislators, health departments, academies of medicine, doctors etc...