Open Letter to AMA on Their Position Statement: Wind Farms & Health 2014
March 18, 2014
AMA President Dr Steve Hambleton
Vice President Professor Geoffrey Dobb
All members of AMA Federal Council
OPEN LETTER
RE POSITION STATEMENT ON WIND “FARM” INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS AND HEALTH
Dear AMA Federal Office Bearers,
As I have not received a response to a detailed email sent to the AMA President and the Vice President 4 days ago concerning the AMA’s position statement on wind “farms” and health, this is an open letter to you all.
This matter is of considerable and increasing national and international interest, especially to rural residents whose health has been severely adversely impacted by existing wind turbine developments, some of whom have been forced from their homes because of the serious adverse health impacts on themselves and their families.
Do Federal AMA members realize that there are no studies showing there are no adverse health effects on a local population after installation of a wind development, and there are no longitudinal studies which show there are still no adverse health effects after 25 years?
In other words, product safety has NOT been established, despite industry assertions to the contrary.
Rather, a literature review conducted by two public health physicians in Rural Ontario, Drs Lynn and Arra, found that all the studies they identified showed evidence of what they called “human distress”. A powerpoint of their literature review findings is available here:http://waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/association-between-wind-turbine-noise-and-human-distress/ and some of those studies were also included in the recent NHMRC Literature Review.
Please give these issues your urgent attention and provide detailed answers to the following questions. Your answers will be made publicly available.
Content of the public statement
Where is the research, conducted inside the homes of the residents reporting the serious repetitive sleep disturbance, the physiological stress, and other symptoms of “wind turbine syndrome”, which confirms that these symptoms are caused by anxiety from alleged scaremongering as your AMA position statement asserts, RATHER than pulsatile infrasound and low frequency noise from wind turbines, which Dr Neil Kelley and his NASA research colleagues established was the DIRECT cause of these “annoyance” symptoms in 1985 in a major US government funded research project in the USA?
This pattern of symptoms of so called “annoyance” reported by residents today is identical to that documented so carefully some 30 years ago by Dr Neil Kelley, in a large collaborativeNASA and aeronautical engineering acoustic field survey in the USA, followed by a laboratory study, funded by the US Department of Energy. If members of the AMA Federal Council are not familiar with those landmark studies which have been known to the wind energy industry since 1987, details are available from the following document (http://waubrafoundation.org.au/2013/explicit-warning-notice/ ).
Are you suggesting that Kelley and NASA were wrong? Given the way the global wind industry reacted to change the design of the turbines from downwind bladed to upwind bladed to reduce these health and sleep damaging frequencies, it is clear that industry believed this research was important and credible.
There is no research demonstrating that the reported health effects in residents living near wind turbines are due to anxiety caused by “scaremongering”, and this was acknowledged in the recent NHMRC literature review. The only misinformation being peddled is by the wind industry, and now by your organization’s position statement.
Why have you repeated the lies of the wind industry that the levels of infrasound inside and outside homes are well below the thresholds of perception? Kelley et al established in 1985 that wind turbine generated impulsive infrasound and low frequency noise could be perceived at levels where it was not audible. The design of the turbine is immaterial to this human perception response – the frequencies generated by horizontal axis wind turbines, downwind or upwind bladed, are still being perceived by the human guinea pigs inside and outside their homes, nearly 30 years later.
This ability to perceive infrasound pressure pulses or peaks is precisely what independent Australian acoustician Les Huson detected in his acoustic field research at Macarthur in 2013, with resident Andrew Gardner who was experiencing distressing “pressure bolt sensations” whilst sitting peacefully inside his home at night, which correlated remarkably well 86{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the time with the pressure peak transients Mr Huson’s monitor was detecting, to which Mr Gardner was “blinded” at the time he was recording his symptoms.