While many who are opposed to the much-debated wind turbine project in Somerset County continue to claim serious health impacts will result from the construction of utility scale turbines in our area, science does not necessarily support these claims. Somerset is an agricultural county with numerous preexisting sources of infrasound. Therefore, no one denies turbines produce infrasound; what is debated are the effects of infrasound upon the population.

If the causes of these symptoms were truly pathological, they would tend to be uniform and all utility turbine surveys would produce similar complaints in similar numbers (per capita of population) — but survey results indicate this is far from the case. Symptoms seem to vary in surveys conducted in different areas and many have a very high approval of turbine use.

The nearest utility scale turbine, located in Lewes, produced a 99 percent approval rate, according to local polls. This large variance in types and numbers of complaints is not indicative of pathological disorders, but rather more closely resembles a psychological disorder such as the nocebo effect. As a psychology student, I am trained (and continue training) to identify the difference between perceived pathological reactions and real psychological reactions. To summarize the nocebo effect, when one person learns something negative is occurring, their nervousness of the event causes them to manifest symptoms.

A prime example of the nocebo effect is when people in an office become ill during flu season. Many people who are not sick will begin to complain of symptoms, such as itchy throats or earaches, because they believe they have contracted the illness — only to discover the source of their symptoms is merely paranoia. The sketchy patchwork of mismatching complaints revealed in surveys on the effects of infrasound produced by wind turbines matches this psychological effect perfectly.

While critics of the project are quick to dismiss a study recently performed by Health Canada, as the full study has yet to be published, there is a valuable point in the summery that has been published. The Health Canada study used two methods to pinpoint annoyance. The first was subjective and involved questionnaires to indicate an individual’s perceived annoyance. The second was a series of biological tests to determine if the individual was under sustained biological stress.

While the results currently released show no indication of biological stress, the subjective study did show perceived annoyance, which is, once again, indicative of the nocebo effect. This shows many of the subjective studies used by the opponents of the turbine project should be taken with a grain of salt, as they did not test for any real biological data and are primarily based on opinion.

While I currently live in Worcester County, I was a resident of Somerset County for 15 years, and I realize how desperately Somerset needs new sources of revenue and employment. Somerset County cannot afford to allow an opportunity such as turbine energy to slip through its fingers because of a pandemic of fear spread by the development of a simple and common psychological effect.

Christina Perry lives in Pocomoke City.