The Health Danger of Noise?

If we look at the history of the fight against other pollutants—smoke, for instance—the trend is generally upward.  Ever since the first substantial air-pollution regulation was enacted…the more that scientists have identified health risks, the more these emissions have been regulated.  Yet with the exception of the very loudest sound offenders, a chart of the fight against noise would resemble less the progressive ascent to enlightenment than the graph of a wildly swinging stock market.
The easiest assumption would be that noise is simply a less-acute public-health threat than smoke.  Relative to global warming, of course that’s true.  But the overall risk to our health from road traffic noise is 40 percent higher than that from air pollutants, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report.  Dr. Rokhu Kim, the head of the WHO’s noise-related task force, told me that while there’s a politically powerful consensus that particulate matter from combustion engines increases cardiovascular mortality, it’s still difficult to identify how those particles actually enter the body and jeopardize the heart.  At this point, Kim said, “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a higher biological plausibility for noise as a trigger of heart disease than air pollution.”

If we look at the history of the fight against other pollutants—smoke, for instance—the trend is generally upward.  Ever since the first substantial air-pollution regulation was enacted…the more that scientists have identified health risks, the more these emissions have been regulated.  Yet with the exception of the very loudest sound offenders, a chart of the fight against noise would resemble less the progressive ascent to enlightenment than the graph of a wildly swinging stock market.

The easiest assumption would be that noise is simply a less-acute public-health threat than smoke.  Relative to global warming, of course that’s true.  But the overall risk to our health from road traffic noise is 40 percent higher than that from air pollutants, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report.  Dr. Rokhu Kim, the head of the WHO’s noise-related task force, told me that while there’s a politically powerful consensus that particulate matter from combustion engines increases cardiovascular mortality, it’s still difficult to identify how those particles actually enter the body and jeopardize the heart.  At this point, Kim said, “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a higher biological plausibility for noise as a trigger of heart disease than air pollution.”

–In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, by George Prochnik

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