Impact of wind turbine sound on general health, sleep disturbance and annoyance of workers: a pilot- study in Manjil wind farm, Iran

Background: the wind turbine’s sound seems to have a proportional effect on health of people living near towind farms. this study aimed to investigate the effect of noise emitted from wind turbines on general health, sleepand annoyance among workers of manjil wind farm, iran.materials and methods: a total number of 53 workers took part in this study. based on the type of job, they werecategorized into three groups of maintenance, security and office staff. the persons’ exposure at each job-relatedgroup was measured by eight-hour equivalent sound level (laeq, 8 h). a noise annoyance scale, epworthsleepiness scale and 28-item general health questionnaire was used for gathering data from workers. the data wereanalyzed through multivariate analysis of variance (manova) test, pillai’s trace test, paired comparisons analysis andmultivariate regression test were used in the r software.results and discussion: the results showed that, response variables (annoyance, sleep disturbance and health)were significantly different between job groups. the results also indicated that sleep disturbance as well as noiseexposure had a significant effect on general health. noise annoyance and distance from wind turbines couldsignificantly explain about 44.5 and 34.2 % of the variance in sleep disturbance and worker’s general health,respectively. general health was significantly different in different age groups while age had no significant impacton sleep disturbance. the results were reverse for distance because it had no significant impact on health, butsleep disturbance was significantly affected.conclusions: we came to this conclusion that wind turbines noise can directly impact on annoyance, sleep andhealth. this type of energy generation can have potential health risks for wind farm workers. however, furtherresearch is needed to confirm the results of this study.