Doctors promote public awareness of Wind Turbine Syndrome (Germany)
Sep 19, 2012
Print Article
Editor’s note: An organization of German physicians and scientists is currently being formed in Bad Orb, Germany, at the instigation of an oral surgeon named Dr. Eckhard Kuck. The group intends to increase public awareness of Wind Turbine Syndrome. Drs. Laurie (Australia), Watts (Australia), Johansson (Denmark), and Pierpont (USA) sent congratulatory letters to the newly formed group (see below).
Dr. Sarah Laurie (Australia)
Sept 11, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
I am delighted to learn that you and some of your colleagues are meeting together to discuss the serious health problems associated with exposure to operating wind turbines.
There are a growing number of independent, ethical and courageous health professionals and engineers who are investigating and then speaking out about what is going on around the world. In doing so, we are choosing to abide by our professional codes of ethics to “first do no harm” and to place the health and safety of the public paramount.
This is a global problem, and an entrenched and powerful global industry, which has every reason to oppose what we are doing. There are clear indications that the wind industry and some of their hired health and engineering professionals do indeed know exactly what is going on and why. Public health authorities universally are refusing to investigate further.
A global collaborative approach between such concerned ethical professionals is therefore urgently required. I look forward to working closely with you and your colleagues, to share information, progress the necessary research, and to support you in your efforts in whatever way I can.
With kindest regards and best wishes to you all,
Dr. Sarah Laurie, Chief Executive Officer
(Click here for a copy of the letter)
»»»»»»»»
Dr. Alan Watts (Australia)
Sept 11, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
I am aware that you have joined with a small group of Physicians in Germany who are courageously committed to our profession and your Patients. A group of Doctors prepared to stand up and say what is right, not what is just safe or popular. You do not stand alone. There are others who likewise refuse to allow wind industry greed or Government ignorance or indifference to damage our global citizenry.
The advent of massive industrial wind factories into rural Australia precipitates increasing national incivility. They pit neighbour against neighbour and rent the very fabric of our once strong rural families, thereby destroying our social harmony and well-being.
They plunder our environment while enriching foreigners all under the guise of some mythical societal benefit. They take our health, our land, our peace of mind and our taxes. We surrender our precious mountains to this most gross industry. And in return they give us social chaos, environmental destruction, lies, deceit, scorn, and ill-health.
What price we pay.
The intractable health problems that have developed with the proliferation of industrial wind turbines have become a worldwide problem. The wind energy companies that are profiting are often international companies or consortiums and it has therefore become apparent that the battle to stop the insidious march of the wind turbines across our treasured landscapes must also be of worldwide proportions.
You and your group have our unbounded support. It is obvious that more doctors must accept the responsibility of their profession and to listen, understand, study and ultimately to speak out with authority and conviction. To anyone who has researched this topic there is much evidence to support it. We in Australia are actively seeking additional research and we are very critical of the various Environmental Assessments that are accompanying any applications to build wind farms largely (but not exclusively) because there is a refusal to monitor infrasound and to accept there are health implications.
A major duty of government via its planning instrumentalities and ministerial control is to anticipate, eliminate or mitigate this kind of societal disruption.
Those who endorse or profit from placing such industrial complexes near the homes of others have no inclination to safeguard or foster a civil and healthy society.
There is immense contradiction in supporting the concept of minimizing the human footprint on the earth while endorsing the destructive intrusiveness of physically massive, feckless energy wind projects.
The wind industry is based on greed, ignorance, subsidy and institutional deceit. Its propaganda rewards the greedy, flatters the gullible, exploits the well-intentioned.
Industrial wind is a fraud of enormous consequence. And people who value intellectual honesty should not allow themselves to be cruelly deceived by such industrial treachery or even by their government’s callous indifference.
I commend you and your colleagues for your efforts and wish you God speed.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Alan C. Watts OAM
(Click here for a copy of the letter)
»»»»»»»»
Mauri Johansson, MD, MHH (Denmark)
Sept 12, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
[We wish] our medical colleagues in the Hessen region the best wishes for the founding meeting September 12th 2012 of a regional medical group to strengthen the efforts to stop further erection of giant wind turbines close to human dwellings, to avoid further illness caused by these damaging interventions. We hope your new organization will soon cover all parts of Germany and then Europe and the whole world, in cooperation with all physicians of the same opinion.
In Denmark we are for the moment 6 physicians active in the necessary work to stop more onshore wind turbines, to prevent and avoid more annoyance and illness among the neighbors, and also initiate serious and independent research to define safe noise limits and distances, risk groups, a better understanding of the mechanisms of illness and much else that so far has been only in the hands of engineers and the turbine industry, working for profits but ignoring human health.
Perhaps you could ask the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW) to establish an information base for physicians on their home page for further contacts?
On behalf of my colleagues and myself: all our best wishes,
Mauri Johansson, MD, MHH
Specialist in Community and Occupational Medicine
»»»»»»»»
Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD (USA)
Sept 13, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
Today you join a small band of physicians around the world who do what clinicians are supposed to do: they take their patients seriously. Today you have announced the creation of a group of German physicians who no longer will be silent about Wind Turbine Syndrome—a global industrial plague for which there is no end in sight.
I salute you and your colleagues for refusing to allow medicine to be subordinated to the will of industry and government, or to the frenzied multitude and media who make no effort to understand that Wind Turbine Syndrome is genuine and horrible.
Even more shocking are those who mock and dismiss victims of this industrial plague—and there are thousands of victims. I refer to scientists and clinicians who have never, ever, interviewed a single sufferer. I refer to government agencies and research institutes that write ponderous reports concluding there is no merit to this illness—declaring it is nothing more than hysteria. Where their conclusions are drawn from amateur or discredited principles of epidemiology, acoustics and neuro-physiology. Where conclusions are derived from turbine noise measurements that deliberately exclude infrasound—the rapidly pulsed infrasound with alarmingly high sound pressures which noise engineers with ultra-sophisticated equipment have been documenting for years.
These engineers, who risk their health and reputations, are heroes.
Infrasound is without doubt the chief cause of Wind Turbine Syndrome—yet every acoustician and physicist employed by the wind industry denies its presence and its insidiously modulated behavior. Or, if they grudgingly acknowledge it, they declare that infrasound has no impact on the auditory and vestibular organs of the inner ear—a subject about which these people know next to nothing.
On a larger front, wind energy has anointed itself the savior of the world against the Apocalypse of Global Warming. Emboldened by this sleight of hand, the wind industry has embraced the rhetoric and fervor of a messianic movement—one with a dangerously fascist mentality. Which explains why many of our colleagues are afraid to oppose dangerously sited wind turbines. Opposition can cost them their research grants, their reputations, their jobs—and, I fear, even their lives. (There have been death threats to some of us.)
I salute you this day for refusing to allow clinical medicine to be corrupted by this delusional, jack-booted, out-of-control industry. The risk you take is high—though not so high, of course, as the risk of losing your conscience and integrity by remaining silent.
Sincerely,
Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD
(Click here for a copy of the letter)
Comment by Melodie Burkett on 09/19/2012 at 6:45 pm
Hear Hear! Well said by all.
“All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men to do nothing”
We salute YOU!
Comment by Marsh Rosenthal on 09/19/2012 at 7:09 pm
Kudos to this courageous band of medical practitioners! Although your numbers are small, now, your voices are clear. The combination of Big Wind and Big Government has hatched a monstrous scheme that does individuals out of their health and expells them from their livelihoods and homes. What else could this be but the global emergence of a neo-fascism that reaches further and deeper than any Hitler or Mussolini could have concocted in their wildest imaginings?
The “greenwashing” that underpins this conspiracy begins in the early grades of public and private schools, with pictures of giant wind turbines depicted as wonderful in their textbooks, taught by “greenwashed” teachers; thence through their entire educational experience. We graduate a cadre renewable energy consultant wannabees who are educated in “green-speak.” They become the emissaries of Big Wind in every town and hamlet across the globe. They sing the song of clean, green, sustainable energy. It is none of these, but they merely shut their new prehensile earholes to the truth when confronted with it. They don’t realize that they have been subsumed by a monstrous lie. They think they are right!
As co-organizer of the Falmouth Conference on Human Rights, I want to invite doctors Watts, Kuck, and Johansson to join us via Skype on November 10, 1-4 PM EST. at the Falmouth Public Library. Dr. Pierpont has already agreed to participate and we are waiting to hear from Dr. Laurie.
This will be a great opportunity for the resident victims and deeply concerned citizenry to express their experiences with industrial wind power and to interact with physicians and other experts of conscience.
We see this as the first of many gatherings seeking EFFECTIVE strategies to address and counter the wind power onslaught.
We hope as many of you that can, will be there with us.
Marsh
Comment by Dr. Angela Armstrong on 09/20/2012 at 4:56 am
I am a retired medical practitioner and am saddened (but not surprised ) by the actions of many of our colleagues in being intimidated by large energy companies and governments throughout the world.
I admire my colleagues who are doing their utmost to investigate and rectify the agony suffered by those people affected by wind turbine syndrome. I am proud to be in the same profession as you!
Editor’s note: Bless you, Dr. Armstrong! Bless you bless you bless you! Would that more physicians would add their approving comments to this posting! Where are they? Intimidated, as you say? Indifferent? We have found that many are indeed indifferent, including these two men (click here & here): they’re too busy, and yet each of them is a specialist in inner ear disorders. One is a physician, the other a PhD scientist. (Our sorrow is immense.)
Comment by Johannes Karl Marciniak on 09/20/2012 at 9:01 pm
Re. green washing, the USA has one of the most brilliant minds who has has been finghting/warning about “green wash” for decades. Lynton La Rouche. His wife has been fighting in Germany. In Australia the Citizen Electoral Council of Australia, and in many other countries. We need to re-educate ourselves and the world.
Comment by James Bruce Craig on 09/24/2012 at 8:53 pm
I too admire the integrity of the growing number of physicians and others who are willing to ask hard questions about wind turbines and advocate for in depth studies on the effects of operating turbines on humans and wild and domestic animals living nearby.
I have been a wind enthusiast for several years, and recently have moved to a more cautious view and approach to safe setbacks and other aspects of large-scale wind turbines. There are well-founded concerns about the impacts on human health. However, in the midst of the growing anti-wind movement, I hear no concerns or see evidence of actions against the use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil in generating electricity.
From all I have learned to date, I understand there are far greater negative impacts on human health and the natural environment from burning coal, oil and natural gas than from using wind to generate electricity. There are reports of asthma, breathing disorders and the premature death of thousands each year due to poor air quality caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Could some of the time and energy many thoughtful scientists and physicians are devoting to challenging the wind industry, be given to challenging the far larger coal, oil and gas industries?
Yes, let’s thoroughly study the impacts of wind turbines and understand the risks, but let us not be silent or complacent about addressing the even bigger concern of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Let’s also advocate for and offer safe alternatives for generating electricity in the present and the future.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my comments and concerns.
Comment by Dr Sarah Laurie on 10/10/2012 at 10:04 am
Dear James,
I share your concerns about the known adverse health impacts of coal and gas extraction industries, and am sure my colleagues do as well. Incidentally they are also emitters of infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN) and vibration pollution, as well as the more recognised dust and air quality issues. I am helping provide information to people made sick by ILFN from open cut and underground coal mining, coal seam gas extraction (the compressors emit LFN), and gas fired power stations, as well as wind turbines. Some of these people have told me that for them, the low frequency noise and vibration problems are far worse than the others.
What I have found is that the symptoms and their pattern are identical in many respects, to those described by people living near wind turbines. The conduct of the noise polluters and their hired acoustic consultants are similarly identical. Strategies such as only measuring outside homes with dBA filters, thereby excluding frequencies below 200Hz, refusing to hand over raw data, claiming the batteries are “flat”, or there was a dog barking, or some other equipment malfunction on the nights when the noise was loud or symptoms were bad during the monitoring period, and ensuring the noise emitting machinery is not working at its usual rate during the monitoring period only to be “ramped back up” again when the acoustic consultant and the noise logger disappears down the driveway…
These are all too familiar to rural residents, and there are some serious ethical questions which the global community of acousticians need to answer about this behaviour, given the problems known to be caused by ILFN even 10 years ago. There are all too few acousticians who really are safeguarding the health and wellbeing of the community, and too many who it would appear are only too keen to compromise these ethics for money, at the direct expense of the health of vulnerable rural citizens impacted by these noise polluting industries. And the noise regulatory authorities are notoriously incompetent, underfunded, or there are serious concerns about corruption.
In Australia, there are some physicians who are actively advocating for research and better air quality standards and regulations with respect to particulate matter from mining, and these are long overdue, as is research, to develop adequate guidelines to ensure mines and other extractive industries are not too close to homes and communities.
But there are some ethical considerations about the behaviour and attitudes of some of these physicians which also need to be mentioned.
Unfortunately, almost all of these physicians are not concerning themselves with the adverse health effects of both wind energy and ILFN from other sources, indeed they have taken the stance of denialists of a problem from noise pollution in many instances. People badly impacted by noise from coal mining and CSG activities have told me that these physicians are just not interested in the problems they are having with industrial low frequency noise. These doctors actively and publicly denigrate the work of the Waubra Foundation, accusing us of being funded by the fossil fuel industry, (we have a tiny budget and fundraising is all from concerned rural residents, with most of the money going to pay for acoustic monitoring) and openly accuse me of “scaremongering” because I report the problems being described by these residents in the media, and I openly advocate for independent research.
My fellow rural physicians at the front line treating these sick and desperate people, and those sick rural residents, need our colleagues assistance and cooperation, not their opposition, disinterest, or even personal attacks and denigration.
Comment by Dr. Angela Armstrong on 10/12/2012 at 5:17 pm
Hi! I’ve only just started on the fight against wind turbines but have already been warned by 2 colleagues against making my feelings known publicly. Luckily, I’m retired and no longer worry about what people think of me—I only care about the truth and justice. We have commissioned a rock song which we hope will catch the attention of people who are unaware of what’s going on.
Watch this space!