NEW technology has long attracted ““. Microwave ovens, television and computer screens and even early telephony all caused anxiety in their time. More recently, cellphones and towers, Wi-Fi and smart electricity meters have followed suit.

Another is gathering attention; the very modern malaise known as . I set out to collect the conditions attributed to wind farm exposure. Within hours, I’d found 50 often florid assertions about different illnesses. Today my total sits at , with a range redolent of Old Testament plagues.

The list includes “deaths, yes, many deaths”, none of which have ever come to the attention of a coroner, cancers, congenital malformations, and every manner of psychiatric problem. But mostly, it includes common health problems found in all communities, with wind turbines or not. These include greying hair, energy loss, concentration lapses, weight gain and all the problems of ageing. Sleep problems are mentioned most, but . Animals get a look in. Chickens won’t lay; earthworms vanish; hundreds of cattle and goats die horrible deaths from “stray electricity”.

“Chickens won’t lay; earthworms vanish; hundreds of cattle and goats die horrible deaths”

In a 35-year career in public health, I have never encountered anything quite so apocalyptic. I’ve visited wind farms and compared their gentle swoosh to the noises that all city dwellers live with daily. Quickly, this phenomenon began to tick psychogenic boxes.

There are several reasons to suspect that the unrecognised entity of wind turbine syndrome is psychogenic: a “communicated” disease spread by anti-wind interest groups, sometimes with . People can worry themselves sick.

Firstly, there are the temporal problems. Wind farms appeared some 20 years ago in the US. There are now just shy of globally. But the first recorded claims that they caused disease came a decade later. Two rural doctors, one in the UK and the other in Australia, made claims repeated widely in newspapers but never published in any journal. Turbines have come to be blamed for chronic conditions like (amazingly) lung and skin cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and stroke. But importantly also acute symptoms, that according to Australia’s high priestess of wind turbine syndrome, Sarah Laurie, an unregistered doctor, can commence within 20 minutes of exposure. If true, what happened in the early complaint-free years?

Then there’s the issue of clustering. The European wind industry sees the phenomenon as largely anglophone, and even then, only in particular regions and around certain farms. Many sites have run for years without complaint. Others, legendary for their vocal opponents even before start up, are hot beds of disease claims. So if turbines were inherently noxious, why do they cut such a selective path? Why do citizens of community-owned turbines in Germany and Denmark rarely complain? Why are complaints rare in western Australia, but rife in several eastern Australian communities?

Opponents readily concede that only a minority of those exposed report being ill but explain this via the analogy of motion sickness: it only happens to those who are susceptible. How then to explain that whole regions and indeed nations, have no susceptible people? The key factor seems to be the presence or absence of anti-wind activists, generally from outside the area.

It is clear the presence of these anti-wind “vectors” is required. Communities which have for years accepted the farms can erupt when activists arrive, spreading alarm and listing health problems. Prominent among these in Australia are wealthy conservative landowners appalled by the very visible presence of the tall green-energy totems, a constant reminder of bucolic decay and the “upstairs-downstairs” disdain they have for those needing income from their often hilly, poorer quality land.

The fact that money seems to be a magic antidote to these ailments further undermines the claims. Health complaints are as rare as rocking horse excrement among turbine hosts. Complaints are rare from those financially benefitting from communal ownership arrangements. It tends to be neighbours of those hosting turbines who make the link with illness. They see the turbines, dislike them and dwell on their misfortune. The perceived injustice can eat away at some, fomented by organised groups.

Wind companies also report residents approaching them with extensive renovation wish lists. One told me of a request for a house to be moved to a lake shore. In rural Australia, residential buy-outs by mining companies are common. Word spreads about shack owners who got lucky. So when a cashed-up company appears, it is understandable that some may see their ticket out via protracted complaints.

Opponents also claim that confidentiality clauses are used to gag hosts, so they can’t speak up about illnesses. I’ve seen several contracts and, predictably, none involve signing away common law rights to claims of negligence.

Finally, there are the apocryphal tales about many families having to abandon their homes. Mysteriously, address lists are never produced. Abandoning unsaleable properties is a sad part of rural decay, a fact which seems to escape fly-in, fly-out climate change denialists.

Previous modern health worries dissipated when the predicted health mayhem never emerged and the feared exotic agents became thoroughly familiar. Hysteria about cellphone towers had its heyday in the late 1990s, at least in Australia, but is rare today. With of the evidence on harm caused by wind farms consistent in their assessment of insignificant risk, how long can this one last?

Australia’s bold plan to remove all branding from cigarettes and their packaging is a triumph for public health

EARLIER this month the Australian government released . If passed, from January 2012 cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco will have to be sold in plain, unappealing olive-brown packs plastered with large, graphic health warnings. The only thing distinguishing one brand from another will be the name written in a standard font on the top, bottom and front of the pack, below the health warning. This is a world first.

The legislation also proposes that cigarettes themselves should be completely plain. That means no branding, no coloured or flavoured papers, no gold-banded filters and no different gauges like slimline and mini cigarettes.

With this bill, the Australian government is sending out an unambiguous message that cigarettes are exceptionally dangerous. Future generations will grow up never having seen the finely crafted elegance of a cigarette box sitting alongside confectionary and groceries in their local shop.

The health minister Nicola Roxon signalled her intention to introduce the bill a year ago and since then the tobacco industry has repeatedly demonstrated why the government is on exactly the right track. It has poured an estimated $10 million into a proxy campaign against the plan, knowing its own credibility is too low to mount an open one. media advertising from the hitherto unheard of “Alliance of Australian Retailers” – funded by British American Tobacco, Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco – featured down-to-earth shopkeepers asserting that plain packs “won’t work, so why do it?” and that there was “no real evidence” to support the policy (a line repeated by the opposition party’s health spokesman Peter Dutton). Many Australians are left wondering, if it won’t work, why is the industry bothering to waste its money campaigning so hard against it?

It is true that no nation has ever introduced plain packs, so arguments for the new policy cannot be drawn from direct evidence. This has become a centrepiece of tobacco industry opposition – a modern example of satirist F. M. Cornford’s 1908 Principle of the Dangerous Precedent: “Every public action which is not customary either is wrong, or if it is right it is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”

The central impetus for plain packaging has been acres of tobacco industry internal documents and unabashed advertising in industry trade magazines highlighting the importance of the pack as the frontline of tobacco promotion, particularly in an era when tobacco advertising bans are growing exponentially. As a 1999 article in World Tobacco (vol 170, p 16) advised: “if your brand can no longer shout from billboards, let alone from the cinema screen or the pages of a glossy magazine… it can at least court smokers from the retailer’s shelf, or from wherever it is placed by those already wed to it”.

A 1985 document similarly explained: “If you smoke, a cigarette pack is one of the few things you use regularly that makes a statement about you. A cigarette pack is the only thing you take out of your pocket 20 times a day and lay out for everyone to see. That’s a lot different than buying your soap powder in generic packaging.” A cover story of the trade magazine Tobacco Journal International spelled it out even more clearly in 2008: “.”

Investment advisors Morgan Stanley advised tobacco industry clients in 2007 that “the other two regulatory environment changes [after taxation] that concern the industry… most are homogenous packaging and below-the-counter sales. Both would significantly restrict the industry’s ability to promote their products.”

Internal industry documents show that many smokers cannot identify their own brand without the packaging and experimental evidence has found that when branding is removed from cigarette packs, people perceive them to be less appealing, have more negative expectations of cigarette taste and rate attributes of a typical smoker of the pack less positively.

Within hours of the announcement, British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco declared they would challenge the decision in courts and seek billions in compensation on the grounds of “seizure of intellectual property”. The government’s own advice is that the legislation will survive the challenge, a position supported by senior legal commentators. Mark Davison, professor of law at Monash University in Victoria, described the industry’s argument as “so weak, it’s non-existent”. He told : “There is no right to use a trademark given by the WTO [World Trade Organization] agreement. There is a right to prevent others using your trademark but that does not translate into a right to use your own trademark.”

With the proliferation of tobacco advertising bans, generations of children are growing into adulthood having never been exposed to tobacco promotions. In Australia, no child under 17 has ever seen direct tobacco advertising, and the number of both young and adult smokers is the lowest on record. In effectively extending the ban on tobacco advertising to packs, the Australian government is simply finishing the job.

Policy domino effects are routine in global tobacco control and this historic decision may bring down the curtain on a century of the tobacco industry presenting its carcinogenic, addictive products in thoroughly market-researched, beguiling packs. When the history of the rise and fall of tobacco-caused disease is written, it will note this momentous initiative.