Complaints from two villages near onshore wind farms have sparked an urgent enquiry by the British Wind Association and the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Even villagers supportive of renewable energy are reporting increased levels of headaches, migraines, palpitations, dizziness, insomnia and depression. It seems that only audible noise levels were considered when selecting sites. Medical experts suspect that 'infrasound' (inaudible low level vibrations transmitted through both the air and earth) is the problem. Meanwhile, some villagers are moving out and house prices are dropping.

Denmark, which began building wind turbines in the 1970s, stopped building onshore wind farms because of the infrasound problem.and

See also
BSE, infrasound and deep vein thrombosis - Is there a link? and Infrasound, deep vein thrombosis and BSE

Organic dairy farmer Mark Purdey became infamous in 1984 when he took on and beat off Department of Agriculture regulations to dowse all his cattle with organophosphate pesticides (OPs), whether or not the herd showed any sign of warble fly infection. He developed a hypothesis that exposure to OPs could leach copper from brain cells, leading to increased levels of manganese in those cells, which bound to prion proteins in the brain, changing their form and leading to BSE.

Mark now believes that exposure to external electromagnetic fields (such as those from mobile phones), radar and infrasound, increases the speed of storage in manganese-rich cells (explaining that manganese-rich, copper-poor cells absorb and store electricity rather than conduct it, as cells adequate in copper do). Having a limited storage capacity, the cells ‘explode’ when their store of electricity reaches a certain point, creating the brain lesions seen in BSE and nvCJD.

Mark has also noted that nvCJD clusters are most often around airports, where aeroplanes bathe the surrounding areas with high levels of infrasound, or under Concorde’s flight path. Concorde emits particularly high levels of infrasound shock waves, impacting 50 kilometres either side. In the US, likewise, the highest levels of nvCJD are found on Staten Island and Long Island, both under the take off flight paths from J. F. Kennedy Airport.Sources of manganese include: fertilisers and fungicides; animal feeds; paints and petrol additives; soya products; and infant milk formula. Disturbingly, manganese is added to human and animal infant milk formula at levels up to 1000 times higher than occurs in breast/udder milk. Infants’ blood-brain barriers are not completely formed, making their brains more vulnerable to damage from toxic metals in the body. Mark notes that BSE was far more prevalent in dairy herds (where calves are nearly always fed on formula) than in beef herds (where calves are nearly always suckled on cows’ milk).