Noise Kills: Alarming New Evidence FromTthe World Health Organization

The story below details how noise impacts health based on alarming new
evidence from the World Health Organization. Given that it states
"the long-term memory recall of children in part of Munich, Germany,
improved by 25 per cent after a nearby airport was closed" it may be
fodder for airport closures in some locations.


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http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...pollution.html
Dying for some quiet: The truth about noise pollution
22 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan

How noise damages health in Western Europe

FRANK PARDUSKI SENIOR could arguably qualify as the world's first
anti-noise martyr. He died on 5 June in Lancaster county,
Pennsylvania, while attempting to slow down a 19-year-old motorcyclist
who had been speeding back and forth outside Parduski's house. On
impact, the 82-year-old was thrown 10 metres and died at the scene
from multiple injuries.

Parduski's death came as a result of his sheer frustration at being
subjected to unwanted noise. However, alarming new evidence from the
World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that thousands more people
around the world may be dying prematurely or succumbing to disease
through the more insidious effects of chronic noise exposure.

“Thousands of people around the world may be dying prematurely or
succumbing to disease through the effects of noise exposure”Though
preliminary, the WHO's findings suggest that long-term exposure to
traffic noise may account for 3 per cent of deaths from ischaemic
heart disease in Europe - typically heart attacks. Given that 7
million people around the globe die each year from heart disease, that
would put the toll from exposure to noise at around 210,000 deaths.

The WHO's investigations have been triggered in part by a rapid
increase in complaints about noise pollution in recent years. For
example, in May a survey by the UK's National Society for Clean Air
(NSCA) showed that noise had a "major impact" for 45 per cent of
respondents, compared with 35 per cent a year earlier. Meanwhile,
figures collected by the UK Office for National Statistics suggest
that noise complaints to local government offices have increased
fivefold over the past 20 years. Noisy neighbours ranked high on the
list of annoyances, as did pubs and clubs. Two per cent of respondents
to the NSCA study said they had moved house because of noisy
neighbours.

“Figures in the UK suggest that noise complaints to local government
offices have increased fivefold in the past 20 years”While excessive
noise is certainly annoying, it has been unclear how this might
translate into an actual impact on human health. Since 2003, the WHO's
Working Group on the Noise Environmental Burden of Disease project has
been attempting to address this problem. Using data from pioneering
studies in countries including Germany, Switzerland and the
Netherlands, a panel of international experts has met four times, most
recently in December 2006, to agree preliminary estimates of the
impact of noise on the entire European population (see "Estimating the
effects of noise"). The objective is to develop a standard rationale
by which individual countries can decide how much money to spend on
noise reduction to improve health.

As well as the projections for deaths from heart disease, the new
figures suggest that 2 per cent of Europeans suffer severely disturbed
sleep because of noise pollution, and at least 15 per cent suffer
severe annoyance. The researchers calculate that chronic exposure to
loud traffic noise causes 3 per cent of all cases of tinnitus, in
which sufferers hear constant noise in their ears. They also estimate
the damage caused by noise pollution to children's ability to learn,
and the damage to hearing caused by "leisure noise" such as listening
to loud music on MP3 players or attending pop concerts and discos (see
Table).

The most startling discovery, however, is the link with death. "The
new data provide the link showing there are earlier deaths because of
noise," says Deepak Prasher, professor of audiology at University
College London, and a member of the coalition of European scientists
who helped assemble and analyse the data. "Until now, noise has been
the Cinderella form of pollution and people haven't been aware that it
has an impact on their health," he says.

Quiet please
The new WHO estimates should provide governments with stronger
justification for regulating sound, and help local authorities decide
where to take action. By the end of this year, all European cities
with populations exceeding 250,000 will be required by European law to
have produced digitised noise maps showing hotspots where traffic
noise and volume are greatest. Coupled with data on health effects,
this should allow them to better target anti-noise measures, such as
re-routing traffic away from hospitals and schools and erecting noise
barriers.

Prasher and other members of the WHO working group hope that revealing
the scale of the health impact will help jolt more dismissive
governments around the world into taking action to regulate noise. In
the US, for example, neither the government nor the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) provide any resources for monitoring,
regulating or researching noise. Everything is left to ad hoc action
by states and cities.

New York is leading the way in this respect. On 1 July, mayor Michael
Bloomberg introduced strict new laws to combat noise pollution,
updating the city's 30-year-old noise code to take account of modern
sources of noise such as loud stereos, car alarms and the spread of
air conditioners. The change was implemented after the city received a
record 354,378 complaints about noise in 2006, up 7 per cent from a
year earlier.

Arline Bronzaft, a veteran noise researcher who chairs the noise
committee of the Mayor of New York's Council on the Environment,
believes that the campaign against loud noise is stepping up a gear in
the US. "There are more and more anti-noise groups, and they're
beginning to have an impact," she says.

Richard Tur, founder of NoiseOFF, an organisation lobbying against
unwanted noise, agrees. "I think there's a groundswell movement
against noise pollution in the US," he says. "But with the current
administration, there's no chance of meaningful environmental
legislation coming out of Washington. America has become a culture of
noise."

John Millet, an EPA spokesman contacted by New Scientist, admits that
there is a problem. The EPA used to have its own dedicated noise unit,
called the Office of Noise Abatement and Control, but this was closed
down during the early 1980s when anti-noise regulation was devolved to
individual states and cities.

"We've always acknowledged that noise can exacerbate serious health
problems over and beyond damage to hearing," says Millet. "It was
clear to us in the 1980s and before that noise pollution was serious
and raises stress levels, and causes a wider array of health issues
including cardiovascular impacts, blood pressure, even heart attacks
to those who were susceptible." However, "There isn't any funding for
noise pollution at the US EPA," he adds.

Whether the new WHO data will change this remains to be seen. Bronzaft
at least hopes it will be a start. As for Louis Hagler, a veteran
campaigner against noise pollution in Oakland, California, he hopes
that noise will eventually become as socially unacceptable as other
forms of pollution, such as smoking. In a recent article condemning
noise as a "modern plague", Hagler notes that "domestic tranquillity"
is one of the six guarantees of the US Constitution (Southern Medical
Journal, vol 100, p 287).

From issue 2618 of New Scientist magazine, 22 August 2007, page 6-9
Estimating the effects of noise
Demonstrating that chronic exposure to noise can produce illness or
death is not simple. For example, traffic generates air pollution at
the same time as noise, so how do you separate out the effects of the
two?

The principle the WHO uses is the same one used to assess the effects
of other environmental pollutants such as cigarette smoke or ozone.
Find households with abnormally high exposure to noise, and compare
death and disease rates in these households with those in quiet
neighbourhoods.

The WHO's researchers also studied groups of people with particular
diseases, such as coronary heart disease, and tried to work out
whether abnormally high exposure to noise increased their risk of
dying.

Finally, they combined this information with data from "sound maps"
that highlight which parts of European cities are noisiest. Knowing
the proportion of the population exposed, it was then possible to work
out roughly how many people will die or suffer disease as a result of
noise exposure, and to estimate the number of years of health that
exposure to noise will wipe out (see Table).

So how loud is loud noise? Sound exposure is generally measured in
decibels (dB), which reflect the pressure on the eardrum. While the
WHO has yet to finalise what levels of chronic exposure cause ailments
such as heart disease and tinnitus (see Table), its Night Noise
Guidelines for Europe can be used as a rough guide. These are due to
be presented at the Inter-noise conference in Istanbul next week, and
include threshold exposure levels that, if routinely breached at
night, would threaten health. The threshold for cardiovascular
problems, for example, is chronic night-time exposure of 50 dB or
above. For sleep disturbance, the threshold is lower, at 42 dB, and
lower still for general annoyance, at just 35 dB. The threshold of
noise judged to have a negative impact on children's learning is 55 dB
during night or day.

That 55 dB is roughly equivalent to the din you would expect in a busy
restaurant, while 75 dB is roughly equivalent to the noise at a busy
junction such as Piccadilly Circus in London.

How noise causes illness
How could exposure to noise have such devastating effects on human
health as causing cardiovascular disease?

Key to solving this puzzle is recognising that noise can create a form
of chronic stress that keeps our bodies in a state of constant alert.
Research published last year by Wolfgang Babisch of Germany's Federal
Environmental Agency in Berlin shows that even when you are asleep,
your ears, brain and body continue to react to sounds, raising levels
of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenalin and noradrenalin.

This makes evolutionary sense, as all animals need to be alert to
threats even when they are asleep, so they can wake up and flee if
necessary, says Andy Moorhouse, an acoustics researcher at the
University of Salford, UK.

However, if these stress hormones are in constant circulation, they
can cause long-term physiological changes that could be
life-threatening. The end result can be anything from heart failure
and strokes to high blood pressure and immune problems. "All this is
happening imperceptibly, and this is the key," says Deepak Prasher of
University College London, who collaborated on the WHO study. "Even
when you think you're used to noise, these physiological changes are
still happening," he says.

What's more, there are a wide range of sources of noise stress. Some
are big and obvious, such as constant heavy traffic or aircraft taking
off, while others are much more subtle and difficult to define as
"pollution", yet can still cause intense anxiety and irritation. In
the case of noisy neighbours, for example, stress might be triggered
simply by knowing a neighbour is in, even if they are not being noisy
at that point. "If you have no control over the noise, that's what
creates anger and stress and causes people to tip over the edge," says
Val Wheedon, a veteran campaigner against noise pollution in the UK
and co-founder of the UK Noise Association. In such disputes, noise
serves not only as an irritation, but symbolises perceived lack of
consideration in others, priming the body for confrontation, Wheedon
adds.

Noise can aggravate stress still further if it disturbs sleep, which
can result in constant fatigue and outbursts of aggressiveness and
irritability. People exposed to noise during their sleep have been
shown to wake up more often and fidget more in their sleep - both
indicators of sleep disruption.

There is also mounting evidence that excessive noise disrupts learning
and education. As far back as 1975, studies by Arline Bronzaft in New
York showed that the reading skills of children in classrooms next to
noisy railways lagged three to four months behind those of their peers
in quieter classrooms. More recently, Staffan Hygge of the Laboratory
of Applied Psychology in Gävle, Sweden, demonstrated that the
long-term memory recall of children in part of Munich, Germany,
improved by 25 per cent after a nearby airport was closed
(Psychological Science, vol 13, p 469). The recall ability of children
living near the new airport deteriorated by the same amount once it
opened.