Occupational Health Expert Exposes The Serious Hazards Of Infrasound From Wind Turbines

Earlier this year in Ljubljana, Slovenia, acoustics and health expert Dr. Mariana Alves Pereira explained the impacts low frequency infrasound can have on health. It’s far from pretty.

Infrasound is very low frequency (<20 Hz) and is below the threshold of human hearing. It is sensed by the human ear only as pressure waves.

Hat tip: Reader Jim Feasel

Dr. Alves Pereira has a Masters in Biomedical Engineering and a PhD in Environmental Sciences.

“It’s a problem to human health”

In her presentation she explains to the audience that because infrasound is of very low frequency, the wavelengths are very long and thus can easily penetrate thick barriers and into buildings. “This is why it’s a problem to human health.” The waves travel kilometers and are difficult to shield against.

Governments rely on inadequate measurements

The acoustic expert also describes why the dBA scale is inadequate for measuring infrasound and thus are irrelevant for their evaluation.

At the 12:30 mark she uses the example of a mink farm in Denmark located near a wind park and so is thus subjected to “acoustic pollution” from the wind turbines. Here she demonstrates how woefully inadequate the methods and measurements often used by permitting authorities for assessing acoustic pollution really are.

Neurological and cardiovascular damage

Later she illustrates how damaging infrasound can be to human health. For example aviation workers have a risk of epilepsy (a neurological problem) that is some 50 times higher than average (22:00) for the occupation and how workers had tumors, and cardiovascular disease from abnormal tissue growth caused by infrasound exposure.

At 33:09 mark, Dr. Alves Pereira presents the clinical stages of vibroacoustic disease for occupational exposures. Workers exposed to infrasound more than 10 years developed severe health damage, e.g. psychiatric disturbances, severe joint and muscle pain, blood in the urine or decreased vision, among others.

Horses near wind turbines developed “boxy foot”

At the 43:00 mark, Dr. Alves Pereira explains how at first they were skeptical of claims made by patients that infrasound had made them sick while at home. In 2000 her team began to look at the claims and found that non-occupational residents who were subjected long-term to infrasound indeed got sick.

At the 48:08 mark, Dr. Alves Pereira turns her attention to wind turbines.

In one example, in Portugal 4 wind turbines were installed within 800 meters of a home and began operation in November, 2006. Five months later in March 2007 the family members in the home were suffering serious health issues and the boy’s performance at school crashed. His energy had been sapped. The horses the family owned developed “boxy foot”.

Moreover, the previously mentioned mink farm in Denamrk suddenly saw hundreds of aborted fetuses (53:30), all caused by infrasound from the nearby wind turbines, experts suspect.

Post traumatic stress syndrome

At the 56:00 mark, Dr. Alves Pereira shows a home in Germany surrounded on two sides by wind turbines located less than 2000 meters away. When the family moved into the home, there had been only two turbines, but then came dozens of new turbines. The family was forced to convert into a bunker in a desparate attempt to shield themselves.

In Ireland a 9-year old child developed epilepsy and the 19-year old brother wound up with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) – as did the worker at the mink farm in Denmark. The house in Ireland had to be abandoned.

Dr. Alves Pereira sums up: “I know it’s kind of depressing, but these are the scientific facts what we have over 30 years of research.”

16 responses to “Occupational Health Expert Exposes The Serious Hazards Of Infrasound From Wind Turbines”

  1. Steve

    Have wind farms been around for 30 years??

    1. Ric Werme

      Yes. The first noise studies were started in 1979 on NASA’s Boone Mountain test farm. The paper from was mostly forgotten until several years ago, a lot of what’s in it is similar to today’s complaints but predates all the political and emotional baggage that followed as the industry grew.

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241273228_Acoustic_noise_associated_with_the_MOD1_wind_turbine_Its_source_impact_and_control

  2. Bitter&twisted

    And there’s SebH, thinking he was safe in his basement.

  3. Penelope

    This information will not be disseminated by the MSM, just like the info about cell phones:

    Blood was examined after people had used or even just carried a cell phone. Read about the conditions under which the following happened: Normal blood cells on a slide are like pennies spread in a single, flat layer. After the cell phone experiment, the cells had become so sticky that they arranged themselves like pennies in a coin wrapper.

    Cell phones have so greatly increased brain and other cancers that the manufacturers can no longer buy liability insurance. US govt says the microwave technology used in cell phones isn’t harmful unless it causes tissue heating.

    “Besides heating, there are other types of biological effects from the extremely low-level microwaves associated with cell phones, called “nonthermal” effects. The Russians have conducted many studies on the nonthermal effects, which they consider more significant than thermal effects, and as a result, they adopted a more stringent guideline that is sixty to one hundred times lower than U.S. guidelines.”

    Read this one, to find out what you can do to lessen the risk. http://www.globalresearch.ca/does-short-term-exposure-to-cell-phone-radiation-affect-the-blood/5429108

    At least look at the pictures

    Scientific knowledge is relatively powerless unless it’s disseminated.

    1. Sommer

      “Scientific knowledge is relatively powerless unless it’s disseminated.”

      Please help to circulate the video of Dr. Mariana Alves-Pereira’s to professionals in Slovenia.
      Innocent men, women and children are experiencing varying stages of cumulative harm that she is describing. Reports are coming in from around the world but the MSM is not reporting this.
      Dr. Alves-Pereira says this harm is irreversible.

  4. John F. Hultquist

    I am still a skeptic about this issue.
    So far I have not found sufficient science (replicated studies, and so on) to hop on this train. For example, the group reporting this work has been criticized, I don’t see more and better studies, and some is years old so there has been time.

    Consider: “The horses the family owned developed “boxy foot”.
    This appears to be from an investigation pre-2011 of events in ’06-’07. So, 12 years ago.
    See this article in The Conversation by Simon Chapman:
    Chapman, Nov 2016

    This is an anti-Alan_Jones piece, but includes material about the Portugal group – that Jones was using.

    I do know that when driving my car and trying to have a window partly down, I have to make adjustments front and back to get fresh air without a bothersome drumming sensation. It is usually easier to close all the windows and use the air conditioner. We live about 20 km from the nearest large wind towers, but many folks live quite close. Locally, there has been no publicly reported issues.

    1. Ric Werme

      The original paper about the horses is a masters thesis. I’m not close to the issue, but I haven’t heard anything related to it.

      https://s3.amazonaws.com/windaction/attachments/2483/Flexural-deformation-in-foals.pdf

      BTW, I can’t recommend anything from Chapman, I contacted him before I decided that, and he did add one comment to my https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/26/is-there-an-equine-version-of-wind-turbine-syndrome/ which introduced a popular press article and asked for comments from people who know something about horses.

      1. Yonason

        Initially it sounded a bit odd that a horse could develop “club foot” (aka “boxy foot”) living near wind turbines, but after a brief internet search it seems plausible.
        https://todaysequine.net/club-foot/

        “What Causes Club Foot?

        There are several causes of club foot. The primary one is genetics. If a horse has a clubbed foot, then the foals that mare or stud produces will have one as well. A diet rich in calories and sugar can cause problems as well. A foal’s bones growing too fast for the tendons can cause immense pain. The pain causes the foal to walk more on its toe making the DDFT shorten and pull the heel up.

        In older horses, a leg injury or chronic pain can cause a similar scenario. It is also worth mentioning that improper trimming will cause significant damage. If a heel is allowed to grow too long, it can cause or worsen a case of club foot.”

        So, perhaps one can add “chronic stress” to the category of “chronic pain?”

        Of course it’s also possible that the chronically stressed owners were distracted from properly caring for their horses’ feet, which apparently require routine maintenance. …or both?

        “A good, consistent farrier schedule will keep all older horses balanced and waylay any future hoof problems. The same goes for older horses that already have a mild case of club foot. Decent farrier work goes a long way to keep horses balanced and happy. It doesn’t completely guarantee that problems such as won’t arise, but if it does, it can be taken care of immediately.”

        Bottom line, while there may be a connection between wind turbine noise and “boxy foot” in horses, it would take a lot more data to make a scientific case for that one. But the medical data on the harm those machines cause to humans seems more than sufficient to indict.

  5. mikewaite

    When ultrasound techniques began to be developed in UK maternity hospitals, my wife was part of a research team in one of the major London hospitals investigating possible effects on human foetuses. Her particular expertise was looking for chromosome abnormalities – none found, attributable to exposure to ultrasound, in the project that she was in, fortunately.
    Is any similar precautionary exercise being conducted with pregnant women living in close proximity to wind turbines?

  6. Richard Mann

    Here is some recent research on infra sound perception: This work is novel both in the experiments/stimulus used and the brain activations reported.

    “Altered cortical and subcortical connectivity due to infrasound administered near the hearing threshold – Evidence from fMRI”

    Markus Weichenberger, Martin Bauer, Robert Kühler, Johannes Hensel, Caroline Garcia Forlim, Albrecht Ihlenfeld, Bernd Ittermann, Jürgen Gallinat, Christian Koch, Simone Kühn
    PLOS
    Published: April 12, 2017
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174420

    Abstract

    In the present study, the brain’s response towards near- and supra-threshold infrasound (IS) stimulation (sound frequency near-threshold) as well as the right superior frontal gyrus (rSFG) during the near-threshold condition. In summary, this study is the first to demonstrate that infrasound near the hearing threshold may induce changes of neural activity across several brain regions, some of which are known to be involved in auditory processing, while others are regarded as keyplayers in emotional and autonomic control. These findings thus allow us to speculate on how continuous exposure to (sub-)liminal IS could exert a pathogenic influence on the organism, yet further (especially longitudinal) studies are required in order to substantialize these findings.

  7. Brian G Valentine

    Before approving wind permits, UK and Deutscher bureaucrats need to be compelled to live within a 500 m radius of a 1.5 kW wind turbine

    That will stop it immediately

  8. sasquatch

    I don’t care if they are harmless to humans, which I doubt, wind turbines are a visual nuisance. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. I don’t want to see them anywhere, period.

    I purchased property purposely in an area where I know wind turbines will probably never be built at all. A North American flyway for water fowl including whooping cranes, a protected species of bird if there ever was one, based my decision on the purchase.

    Have seen and heard more than twenty whoopers this year. Sandhill cranes, Canadian geese, snow geese, grey geese, ducks, a plethora of species of ducks, are flying more or less throughout the year. Orioles, humming birds, sparrows, pigeons, pheasants, grouse, blackbirds by the thousands, all flying back and forth all day long. Predators like hawks, falcons, bald eagles, all are on the hunt out there 500 yards from my doorstep. Now and then I hear a meadowlark, but not like it once was.

    Wind farms are incompatible to avian populations, that is a given.

    The airspace is nothing to be trifled with. Twenty billion birds on the North American continent alone have to have some room. Wind turbines encroach upon that space.

    Wind turbines are dependent on oil just like any other machine there is. You have to change the gear oil, the gearbox is the whole gizmo that will do the work.

    If there are 60 gallons of gear oil in one gearbox, times 347 thousand adds up.

    If you have ever changed gear oil from a gearbox, you will know what I mean. All of that churning inside will break down the oil, it will need new gear oil.

    The gear oil in a refined barrel of oil amounts to 0.42 gallons. One hundredth of a barrel or you will need one hundred barrels of crude to obtain one gallon of gear oil.

    Doesn’t that add up to 6000 barrels of oil to refine out the gear oil from the crude to fill a gearbox in one wind turbine that uses sixty gallons of gear oil? Once each year, maybe two years nowadays, times 347,000 of them, is going to be a big job as time goes by, going to get expensive. You are doing a fool’s errand in the long run. Have at it. Don’t expect it to last, it was a dead end from the get go.

    If maintenance isn’t done, every single wind turbine standing will fail. It is the nature of the beast.

    Of course, it is all synthetic gear oil and the used gear oil can be and is recycled, there is use for used gear oil and it can be made new again. One consolation, gear oil is recycled, that is about it for a wind turbine’s usefulness.

    Decommissioning and recycling the wind turbine itself is going to be a nightmare. Nobody is going to want to do that, it won’t pay.

    It is an ecological disaster in the making, anthropogenic dumbfckery at work.

  9. Steve

    Excellent Comment sasquatch

  10. Yonason

    “WIND ENERGY

    Unreliable, expensive and utterly impractical”
    http://www.akdart.com/wind.html

    See there for quite a few references on the health effects, in addition to everything else they cite as being wrong with the wind power boondoggle.

  11. Yonason

    SOME PROGRESS

    Still a long way to go yet, though.

  12. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #335 | Watts Up With That?

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