EX-PHARMACIST KROGH REPEATS ATTEMPT TO DECEIVE CANADIAN DOCTORS

2014/01/20 · by Mike Barnard · 

Last year, three people with irrelevant credentials but seats on the Advisory Group of an anti-wind campaigning organization managed to bootstrap extremely weak papers and material into a Commentary in Canadian Family Physician claiming that family doctors would see health problems near wind farms. It was deeply slanted, cited extraordinarily weak evidence as if it were very strong, and ignored the the strong evidence that discredited their biased hypothesis. It was misleading of doctors, and it was crafted to pass peer review in a generalist journal where the reviewers could not be expected to be current on the literature or the author’s backgrounds.

Sadly, they’ve done it again, this time in the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine.

You would be forgiven for wondering why Krogh, a retired pharmacist and administrator and Horner, a Chartered Management Accountant, are writing a medical commentary on wind energy, a subject that obviously neither of them are professionally or academically qualified to discuss. The answer, of course, is that the rural Ontario village that they decided to retire in was threatened with a wind farm, and these well-off urban professionals didn’t want their rural fantasyland sullied with another economic mechanism of value to people who actually worked there. The worst kind of NIMBY’s, in other words.

Dr. Jeffrey is at least a GP in Manitoulin, but he follows in the unfortunate footsteps of a local dentist who has refused dental service to the local First Nations tribe in protest over their plans to construct a wind farm on their land.

So what can be said about this latest attempt to mislead Canadian doctors into misattributing common symptoms unrelated to wind turbines to the wrong source?

Let’s start with the most obvious:

Competing interests: None declared.

Carmen Krogh, Brett Horner, and Dr Roy Jeffrey, rural GP, are all members of the Advisory Group of the anti-wind Society for Wind Vigilance. Somehow, they neglected to mention both their affiliation to an anti-wind advocacy organization and the extent and depth of its efforts. 

Further, Krogh and Horner neglect to mention their fight against a local wind farm they feel threatens their retirement.

Of course, the listing of their credentials calls into question their qualifications to judge matters of public health, especially when compared to the all star team Dr. Arlene King, Chief Medical Officer for Ontario, led for the 2010 literature review which found no health impacts, or the all star team Dr. David Colby, Medical Officer for Chatham Kent, worked with on the robust CanWEA / AWEA study in 2009. For that matter, their credentials are pretty pitiful compared to any of the nineteen medical reviews to date world wide finding no health impacts from wind energy.

Krogh et al misquote Dr. Colby in their biased advocacy piece, just as they quote out of context Dr. Geoff Leventhall, a sane voice in noise and health who is on record as saying that wind turbines are not a significant issue.

Dr. Colby took Krogh to task publicly for her misrepresentations in the 2013 Wind and Health conference in Denver, Colorado. It’s fascinating that she feels fit to put her misquoting in print.

That conference was organized by Dr. Geoff Leventhall, the most respected person working at the intersection of wind energy, noise and health, who has organized it for five years.  Ms. Krogh is one of several anti-wind campaigners who intentionally misquote Dr. Leventhall despite correction. The most egregious example in this paper is her use of a statement of Dr. Leventhall’s on low-frequency noise where he talks about “immense suffering”.  I asked Dr. Leventhall for his comments on this.

This still applies to the types of noise for which it was written – which did not include wind turbine noise. People who have come recently into dealing with LF problems do not seem to know that there is more than one kind of LF noise. LF environmental problems have been almost entirely caused by audible tonal noises, originating in rotational or reciprocating machinery, such as fans, compressors, diesel engines etc. WHO refers to these tones as LF components. Other types of LF noise are narrow band peaks, such as from gas turbines for power generation and broadband LF, such as ground noise rumble round airports. People respond differently to these. The most annoying is tonal noise. What happens is that an audible tone in the LF region might be very irritating, but not register sufficiently on the A-wtg for action to be taken against the source. It is people in this predicament who might genuinely suffer, depending party on their personality, and plead for relief. The number affected is small, and many of these turn out to be Hum Sufferers – affected by noise of unknown origin and which can’t be measured. Maybe some have tinnitus.

You cannot consider a noise, particularly a low level of noise, separately from the people who hear it. There is a combined (noise + person) effect. I am thinking of stopping using “sensitive” in relation to people and replacing it with “reactive”. This brings out more that the sufferer is not simply being done to, but is reacting to what is being done. Some of the reaction is caused by resentment. People are very complicated!

The tones from wind turbine noise are very low frequency and inaudible. Broader band noise, falling at around 5dB/octave externally becomes audible at frequencies above 40-50 Hz.

As is clear from Dr. Leventhall’s comments, the most charitable thing that can be said about Krogh et al is that they don’t understand low-frequency noise. The less charitable thing that can be said is that they will cherry pick any statement which confirms their bias without seeking to understand or qualify their end results.

Looking further into this poor piece of work, as always they cite very weak literature published in the Bulletin of Science and Technology (BSTS), bootstrapping an apparently solidly referenced article off of the most tenuous of material.

 BSTS was de-indexed more than a decade ago, a strong indication that the journal was of insufficient quality to continue to index, and it has no impact factor maintained by any of the major journals. The editor, an associate professor in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Toronto, felt that the people complaining about wind energy weren’t being given a venue, so published a special issue which showed no signs of peer review and contained remarkably bad and one-sided material. The citing of this material is very deceptive and intended to allow them to pass peer review in a non-specialist journal. Knowledgeable peer reviewers would require them to put substantial caveats around BSTS source material among others.

As one example, they quote Magda Havas’ pseudoscience concerns about stray voltage — her long-term bugaboo — as if it had anything to do with wind turbines, and mention EMF as if it is a problem, instead of something urban dwellers worldwide are bathed in to much greater degree than anyone living anywhere near a wind turbine. Their already weak arguments fall apart when they claim this sort of shoddy material as a concern.

Once again, they point to loss of economic value as a concern hinting at the myth of property value loss, when there are now eight majorstudies internationally of more than a quarter million property transactions which have found no relationship between wind farms and property values. By comparison, there are a handful of mostly anecdotal case studies and two weak studies of just over 10,000 property transactions which suggest negative impacts. And of course there are the significant economic gains which flow into rural areas via construction and maintenance jobs, manufacturing of wind turbine components and tax revenues which they neglect to mention as well.

As always, they make claims of comprehensiveness, yet somehow manage to ignore robust research published well before their publication date from Professor Simon Chapman et al of USydney, Fiona Crichton et al of UAuckland and Claire Lawrence et al of UNottingham which finds very different reasons for complainants’ annoyance related to wind farms. It’s understandable, as their work shows that anti-wind campaigners such as Ms. Krogh et al are the cause of complaints, not the cure, and that complaints are a communicated disease.

They mischaracterize Ontario ERT decisions liberally as well. The most charitable way to describe ERT decisions is that they kicked health concerns out of court, most recently with the December Dufferin Wind Power decision, and before that with the Ostrander Pt decision. In the most recent decision, the so-called experts were either dismissed completely — Sarah Laurie –, or their evidence was dismissed — Dr. McMurtry –, or they were told sharply to stick to things that they could actually claim expertise on — acoustician Howe.

The only thing positive that can be said about this biased piece of work is that it isn’t as  bad as their previous publication in Canadian Family Practitioner, where a host of experts stitched them a shroud in the Rapid Responses. With continued attempts to publish misleading information, it’s possible that peer review will eventually bring them to the point where they are actually accurate, don’t misrepresent the evidence and base their opinions on solid material which they actually understand. Of course, at that point they would be forced to agree that wind farms don’t harm human health with reasonable setbacks such as those mandated in Ontario’s Regulation 359/09.

Once again Krogh et al have managed to find a journal with volunteer peer reviewers who let their scare-mongering pass, unethically attempting to create health fears where no health risks exist. It’s a pity that they are able to game the system.

Krogh specifically has been asked why she persists in raising health fears when research from Australia and New Zealand clearly shows that it is the raising of the fears which causes both symptoms and misattribution of symptoms, not the wind farms themselves. She is in denial that she is part of the problem, not part of the solution. And all because she doesn’t want her retirement home to have a wind farm near it.