The judge should request the medical records of complainants from periods both before and after the operation of wind farms, to settle the matter of whether the complaints were sufficiently serious to have been given medical attention, and that they did not have these problems before the wind farm commenced operation.

My paper concluded that the claim was a factoid promoted by wind farm opponents for dramatic, rhetorical impact. The claim sits alongside other contestable claims made by wind farm opponents, including a list of symptoms of Biblical pestilence proportions (currently numbering 236) said to be caused by wind farm exposure, the promotion of non-diseases, claims that wind farms can rock stationary cars 1km away, make people’s lips vibrate 10km away and that they can be heard at up to 100km.

This report takes the number of reviews published on the issue since 2003 to 20. And all have reached the same broad conclusions.

As blogger Ketan Joshi has observed, unlike any other disease “wind turbine syndrome” seems to be a health problem that occurs mainly in English-speaking countries.

What links the phenomena of allegedly stressed emus, dancing cattle and disoriented echidnas? Nothing but the ill-founded trend to blame anything and everything on wind farms

People who host wind turbines on their properties and derive rental income from wind energy companies have important stories to tell about living alongside turbines, but they’ve largely been absent from the debate on wind farms and health. Australian filmmaker and researcher Neil Barrett is finally giving this critical group a voice in his new short film, The way the wind blows, released today.

Earlier this week researchers at the University of Auckland published an experimental study showing that people primed by watching online information about health problems from wind turbines, reported more symptoms after being exposed to recorded infrasound or to sham (fake) infrasound. . . The study provided powerful evidence for the nocebo hypothesis: the idea that anxiety and fear about wind turbines being spread about by anti-wind farm groups, will cause some people hearing this scary stuff to get those symptoms. . .

Background and objectives With often florid allegations about health problems arising from wind turbine exposure now widespread in parts of rural Australia and on the internet, nocebo effects potentially confound any future investigation of turbine health impact. Historical audits of health complaints across periods when such claims were rare are therefore important. We test 4 hypotheses relevant to psychogenic explanations of the variable timing and distribution of health and noise complaints about wind farms in Australia. . .