On claims that wind turbines are crippling horses via "turbine foot"
Claims surface online that alleged "wind turbine syndrome" causes crippling deformities in foals. What's really going on?
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There’s a case study floating around the Internet about a farm where all the horses were healthy, but after the installation of wind turbines nearby, the newborn foals all developed crippling deformities in their front legs called a “flexural deformity of the distal interphalangeal joint.” The case study is actually just over a decade old (2013) but the “TikTok science” community has found it and resurrected it, and sending it viral as proof that wind turbines cause a huge range of unacceptable health problems (spoiler alert: they don’t).
Unlike most other claims of wind turbine syndrome, this one suggested a plausible-sounding mechanism: subtle vibrations in the ground, which negatively impacted the growth of the newborn bone.
A graduate student in Lisbon, Teresa Costa e Curto, wrote her masters thesis on this case, titled “Acquired flexural deformity of the distal interphalangic joint in foals”. It’s not published online anywhere, so far as I was able to find, but it is excerpted on this web page. A snippet:
In the case series presented here, there was no obvious cause for the development of this problem, therefore we hypothesised that unusual environmental conditions might have played an important role in the development of this condition, especially those introduced in recent years.
What recently introduced environmental conditions? The website’s author explains:
There were no changes in diet, exercise or any other significant alteration in management. Until in 2008, wind turbines were installed adjacent to the property and grazing paddocks. Since this date, a good number of foals and yearlings have developed deformities.
…and the Internet has run with it. This letter sent by a concerned citizen to the South Dakota public utilities commission cites yet another (also unpublished) undergraduate paper by Mariana Alves-Pereina, also from Portugal, on the same subject:
"Tissue analyses of the defected tendons were preformed and revealed the classical features of Low Frequency Noise (LFN)-induced biological responses: thickening of blood vessel walls due to proliferation of collagen in the absence of an inflammatory process."
The study on 11 foals showed issues with front limb, including coffin/pedal bone rotation and clubbed feet. Several of the horses had to be euthanized. The towers were installed 984-2297 feet from their farm. The study showed healthy horses brought into the farm showed adverse effects shortly afterwards.
Sounds like it’s at least something that needs looking into, doesn’t it? Well, not so much. We haven’t really needed to, because we already know what’s going on.