… in a press release 5-31-07 from the Vibro-Acoustic Disease (VAD) research group in Portugal, people living in the shadow of industrial wind turbines have moved a step closer to understanding the nature of the Wind Turbine Syndrome many of them experience and complain about.
Professor Mariana Alves-Pereira (an acoustical engineer) and Dr. Nuno Castelo Branco (a surgical pathologist) recently took numerous fine-grained noise/vibration measurements within a Portuguese home surrounded by four (4) industrial wind turbines. The closest turbine being nearly 1000 feet (300 meters), almost a fifth of a mile, from the affected home. (The turbines have been operating since November 2006.)
Alves-Pereira and Branco then matched these in-the-home (actually, in the bedroom of a 9-year-old child with obvious Wind Turbine Syndrome symptoms) Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise (ILFN) readings to ILFN readings taken within a home near Lisbon, Portugal, where a family of four is definitively suffering from Vibro-Acoustic Disease caused by a nearby deep-water grain elevator (where freighters off-load their grain). (The readings in this second home were taken in the bedroom of a 10-year-old child with demonstrated VAD, again from the deep-water grain elevator about a mile away across the Tagus River.) Incidentally, VAD is conclusively demonstrated by echocardiograms (checking for thickened pericardium and valves not related to any inflammatory process), bronchoscopy (looking for a characteristic “pink lesion”), pulmonary function tests (especially the PCO2 test, which is abnormal in all VAD patients), brain MRI’s and brain wave studies (brainstem auditory evoked potentials and the P300), and, when possible, postmortem tissue pathology and animal experimentation. VAD, in other words, produces a distinctive pathological fingerprint (click on http://www.ninapierpont.com/pdf/Branco_&_Alves-Pereira,_Vibroacoustic_Disease.pdf).
Their results stunned them: the ILFN readings in the bedroom of the 9-year-old with obvious Wind Turbine Syndrome symptoms are actually higher than ILFN readings in the bedroom of the 10-year-old with demonstrated VAD caused by the nearby grain elevator. Alves-Pereira and Branco published a case study of the 10-year-old and his family in the Proceedings of Internoise 2004 (click on http://www.ninapierpont.com/pdf/Alves-Pereira_grain_elevator_VAD.pdf).
Their conclusion?
These results irrefutably demonstrate that wind turbines in the proximity of residential areas produce acoustical environments that can lead to the development of VAD in nearby home-dwellers.
I have attached a copy of the press release. You are welcome to circulate this at will, and to post it on websites. Nina & I urge you to bring this to the attention of news media and government officials. The VAD research team can be contacted at vibroacoustic.disease@gmail.com
The credentials of Alves-Pereira and Branco?
Professor Mariana Alves-Pereira
School of Health Sciences (ERISA)
Lusofona University
Portugal
and/
Department of Environmental Sciences & Engineering
New University of Lisbon
Portugal
Nuno Castelo Branco, MD
Surgical Pathologist
President, Scientific Board
Center for Human Performance (CPH)
The Center for Human Performance is a civilian, non-profit organization dedicated to research in vibro-acoustic disease. CPH was founded in 1992 and has been the organization which coordinates all the different teams that work on vibro-acoustic disease research, and that include (in Portugal) the cardiology and pulmonary departments of the Cascais Hospital, the neurophysiology department of the National Institute of Cancer, the department of human genetics of the National Institute of Public Health, the department of speech pathology of the School of Health Sciences of the Polytechnical Institute of Setúbal, among several others over the past 25 years.
All of this information is currently posted on Nina Pierpont’s website: www.ninapierpont.com > Wind energy > Articles by other authors. Scroll down to close to the bottom. On the website, Nina has given a short introduction and comment to VAD and Wind Turbine Syndrome, which I have copied and pasted immediately below this note.
Calvin Luther Martin, PhD
www.calvinluthermartin.com
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