M.D. treats patients for Wind Turbine Syndrome (Australia)

Aug 18, 2011

Facebooktwittermail

·
Hepburn wind farm: Local doctor speaks out”
· 

 Dr Mitric-Andjic

·
—Brendan Gullifer, The Courier (8/18/11)  (The images used throughout this posting were supplied by WTS.com—Editor.)

·
A local doctor has spoken out publicly for the first time after treating patients for symptoms associated with living near wind turbines.

Dr Andja Mitric-Andjic, who practises in Daylesford, said she had treated at least two local patients for sleep deprivation, and spoken with others living near the Hepburn wind farm.

Dr Mitric-Andjic, who lives at Korweinguboora, said she, her husband and14-year-old son had also suffered sleep interruption since the turbines began operating.

Dr Mitric-Andjic said she decided to speak out because the problems being experienced by local residents could not be ignored.

“Wind farm, what do you mean wind farm?” she said.

“This is industrial. No one is against green energy. Everyone would say yes, of course, but put it out of residential areas.”

Dr Mitric-Andjic, 49, practises at Springs Medical Centre. She and her husband bought land on the Ballan-Daylesford Road seven years ago and built a house there last year.

She said patients had come to see her to complain about the noise from the two local turbines.

“They can’t sleep and in the morning they wake up exhausted. They can’t function. They have poor concentration, probably because of poor sleeping.”

Hepburn Wind chairman Simon Holmes à Court said any claims of adverse health effects would be taken “very seriously”.

“As a community organisation, we’re very concerned about the well-being of our community,” Mr Holmes à Court said.

“If anyone is concerned that the turbines are harming them, we want to meet to understand their claims. Our project officer lives in Leonards Hill and is in frequent contact with the community around the wind farm.”

Turbine landholder Ron Liversidge said any claims of noise problems were “completely false”.

Mr Liversidge said he had been doing his own noise monitoring, by parking his car on the road and listening.

“Anybody can come and listen for themselves,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s any problems whatsoever.”

Click here for source on Hepburn Wind site

»»»»»»»

·
Editor’s comment
:  Now for some real transparency in this whole sordid tale.  The following rebuttal was written by Sarah Laurie, MD, Medical Director of the Waubra Foundation (Australia).  Read her response to the “Hepburn Wind” crowd and see if you don’t agree that Hepburn’s “Complaint” process is nothing more than posturing and rhetoric (i.e., bullshit).

·

·
Sarah Laurie, MD, Medical Director of the Waubra Foundation

Hepburn Wind Chairman Mr Simon Holmes à Court was warned this was the inevitable consequence of locating turbines too close to homes in October 2010, before the turbines were constructed. I wrote to him informing him of this by email on 18th October, 2010 and was subsequently interviewed by a local journalist, who quoted a representative from Hepburn Wind saying that they were confident there would be no problems, “as there were plenty of studies showing there were no problems” and they had no intention of waiting until independent health studies were completed.

Hepburn wind representatives and directors cannot say they were unaware of the issues, and the possibility that their turbines might have this effect, because of where they were sited. They chose to ignore that advice at their peril, and have instead chosen to “shoot the messenger”.

Unfortunately, when I met with Mr Holmes à Court earlier this year, to plead with him to delay starting the turbines until a health study had been done, he admitted he had not read Dr Pierpont’s study, and proceeded to accuse me of scaremongering, both in a private meeting with him and publicly in the oral evidence he gave to the Australian Federal Senate Inquiry into Rural Wind Farms (Melbourne hearing 29/3/11, p. 54 onwards).

This conveniently ignores the fact that problems with wind turbines in Australia were being publicly reported well before I became aware of the problem in July 2010. For example, Dr David Iser was an Australian GP who documented cases in Toora in 2004 and notifed health authorities and the then government, but he was ignored. Trish Godfrey, the Waubra resident, had publicly discussed her problems on a number of occasions, well before July 2010.

“Clinical whistleblower” is a far more apt description than “scaremonger”, and I join the ranks of others such as Dr Amanda Harry (UK), Dr David Iser (Australia), Dr Nina Pierpont (USA), Dr Robert McMurtry (Canada), Dr Michael Nissenbaum (USA), Dr Chris Hanning (UK), Dr Mauri Johansson (Sweden), Dr Henning Theorell (Sweden), forty physicians in Quebec, Canada, who have petitioned the Quebec government to do health proper health studies, and numerous others including more recently Australian doctors such as Dr Andja Mitric-Andjic, Dr Max Whisson, and Dr Wayne Spring, the Sleep Physician at Ballarat who has seen a number of patients from Waubra.

We now have the dangerous situation of an Australian Federal Government hell-bent on implementation of a technology which is causing serious harm to health around the globe when it is sited inappropriately, yet no action has yet been taken on the findings of their own Federal Senate Inquiry, which recommended urgent research to investigate this problem. It’s full steam ahead, reminiscent of the Titanic…

The same government is using buckets of taxpayers’ money to advertise this new government policy, featuring Hepburn Wind in it’s advertisements for its government policies, while at the same time this well-intentioned “community-owned” (actually, it is shareholder-owned) wind development is driving people out of their homes of 30 years. And there are apparently 50 more such “community” wind developments planned across the country by Mr Holmes à Court and his colleagues. One can only hope that the others are more appropriately sited, based on good independent scientific study, not yet done, or a very conservative setback buffer. Why are they not apparently listening to the National Health and Medical Research Council’s own advice to adopt a “precautionary approach”?

No amount of well-intentioned wishful thinking on the part of the directors and investors in these community wind development initiatives will protect nearby residents from the deleterious effects of physical forces such as sound waves, particularly the extremely low frequency sound waves emitted by wind turbines, both airborne and seismic, and which are uniquely disturbing, and uniquely penetrating.

It is high time that Mr Holmes à Court and all the other directors of Hepburn wind faced up to their legal responsibilities as company directors, and took those responsibilities seriously, and did their due diligence with respect to the adverse health effects of these wind turbines. They need to ensure that the acoustics advisers they are using are indeed doing their job properly.

Already, after a very short time operating under the company Hepburn Wind, the turbines are causing harm to health, and have had a devastating impact particularly on one family living 500 metres away, with two of the family members being so severely impacted that they have had to move out, or go away, to get relief from the symptoms and problems they are experiencing.

ALL PREDICTABLE. And ALL PREVENTABLE with the safe siting of turbines, well away from homes.

We know from the Falmouth, Massachusetts (USA) experience, that just one turbine is enough to cause serious harm to human health, from the case reports of serious consequences for neighbouring residents, and visitors (including acoustician Rob Rand).

THE TIME FOR DENIAL OF SERIOUS HARMFUL EFFECTS OF THESE TURBINES IS OVER.

IF THEY ARE CONSTRUCTED BEFORE THE NECESSARY INDEPENDENT ACOUSTICS AND HEALTH STUDIES ARE DONE, THEY MUST BE CONSTRUCTED WELL AWAY FROM HUMAN HABITATION.

IN AUSTRALIA, THE LIMITS OF CURRENT REPORTS OF SYMPTOMS DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTABLE TO WIND TURBINES OPERATING (highly characteristic body vibrations and the nighttime waking in a panicked state with prolonged difficulty getting back to sleep) is 10 kilometres, which is why our Explicit Cautionary Notice has given this distance as the necessary buffer, based on current knowledge. As turbines increase in size and power generating capacity, this may well need to increase, because of the increase in low frequency sound generated (see Moller & Pedersen’s recent paper).

·
Dr Sarah Laurie

Medical Director, Waubra Foundation

  1. Comment by Karin Green on 08/28/2011 at 2:18 pm

    Like so many of these reports on human health degradation, this story includes the apparently obligatory line: “No one is against green energy. Everyone would say yes, of course, but put it out of residential areas.”

    As long as you continue to buy into the AWG farce and accept the menace of wind farms at any distance—you will gain no ground! You are simply being NIMBY!

    For a multitude of additional reason for rejection wind farms—which I tire of relating—you must have the courage to “Just say NO—NEVER—ANYWHERE!”

    Many years ago Rachel Carson wrote about the “Silent Spring“! The world eventually listened! It is time someone wrote about an “Empty Sky” or a “Barren Ground” or about “Wounded Weather.” Weather because new studies now are revealing that wind installations can have an adverse affect on rainfall and can exacerbate heating. These affects are not merely local but can impact large large geographical areas!
    .
    Rachel Carson
    Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring

  2. Comment by Mark Duchamp on 08/28/2011 at 5:20 pm

    It’s not being NIMBY to fight against the health effects of windfarms. Health issues are paramount, and planning authorities as well as wind farm developers must be held responsible for the damage they cause to residents, especially health-wise, but also regarding losses in property values, tourism, protected wildlife, water quality,etc.

    Class action lawsuits seem to be the necessary course of action to stop the irresponsible actions of morally corrupt politics.

  3. Comment by Itasca Small on 08/30/2011 at 8:16 pm

    We have to avoid the appearance of NIMBY as we do present the truth of health affects. They DO NOT HEAR through the indoctrination if there is any hint of NIMBY. We must realize that as long as they see $ signs and choose to believe the propaganda that they are helping to ‘Save the Planet,’ the pro-wind industry, advocates, and facilitators – county officials here in the U.S., will NOT hear us! Our health and homes mean nothing to them when they can feel morally superior to us that we aren’t willing to be the ones chosen to be sacrificed to the god of Green Energy.

    John Droz, jr. is right when he teaches us to hit the lack and real of science, and the truth about the economic and environmental negative impacts. They have to come to understand that the emperor has no clothes and Big Wind is the Pied Piper leading the world over the cliff into the deep dark abyss.

    These monsters do NOT belong anywhere on the planet for a number of serious reasons. We must not agree that they can be built far enough away from residences; I live approximately 11 miles from a wind power plant of 30 – 2.2MW WTs sited on a large ridge, with open, rolling terrain, and geological structure that are helping to propagate the infrasonic airborne and seismic sound waves to my home and health, for longer distances than have been studied thus far. Except for the early and now-current evidence from the seismic array in Scotland where they are now insisting on even greater distances between them and WTs – I think I just read the new distance is 50 km!

    And, the catastrophic impact on the animals – both domestic and wild – denies the direction to just put them far enough from people. I suggest that everyone read Ivan Buxton’s 2006 paper on infrasound and living creatures – you can search engine it and it will come up. I do not know how anyone can read this with an open mind and not be strongly impacted with the truth that these machines should not be sited anywhere on the planet – or in the atmosphere!

    Just moving them is NIMBY because they are moved to someone else’s property and neighborhood, whether human, animal, bird or bat.

    Any compromise less than banishment IS NIMBY. I believe that when those against the wind come to embrace this fact as a united front, the dynamic created will gain the attention of the unaware, indoctrinated Public and bring-about the End of the Second Wind Age for a gravely distressed planet.

    The First Wind Age lasted millenia and ended because the demand for energy outstripped wind’s capability to produce it economically. Now, in this Age, even sailboats can be fitted with back-up liquid fuel engines to save them in doldrums or emergencies, and I imagine they also have liquid fueled generators for general power onboard. Without lies and subsidies there would not be a Second Wind Age for us to fight.

    Only God can open the hearts, minds, and souls of Big Wind True Believers to discernment of the truth and exposure of the lies. A major part of our fight is to pray that they will let God bring them to the truth. There are positive signs out there of slow progress; it IS happening as God answers our prayer and helps us fight the battles.

The comments are closed.