**1.1 Infrasound and human health: brief overview**

With the growing industrialization and mechanization that occurred worldwide in the 1960s, infrasound in the environment began to take its toll on workers and urban citizens. Thus, in 1973, the National Research Council of France organized an International Colloquium entirely dedicated to infrasound [1]. One of the outcomes was the establishment of permissible levels for infrasound exposures in the Russian Federation [2]. **Figure 1** shows the legislated values for the year 2000.

With the introduction of industrial wind turbines (IWT) in mostly rural areas, noise complaints by local residents began to emerge in the media [3, 4, for example] and in scientific journals [5, 6, for example]. And yet, the vast majority of noise measurements performed in and around homes near wind power plants (WPP) showed values well within the established guidelines [7, 8, for example]. This apparently paradoxical situation has even prompted some authors to assume a psychosomatic origin for resident noise complaints [9], or to associate these health complaints with a lack of monetary gain from the WPP [10]. In direct contradiction to the notion of a psychosomatic origin for these noise complaints, are the animal studies showing increased physiological stress when living in the wild, close to WPP [11, for example], or under laboratory conditions, simulating occupational environments [12, 13, for example].
