Deadly Noise
Frank Parduski Sr. could arguably qualify as the world's first anti-noise martyr. He died on June 5 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, while attempting to slow down a 19-year-old motorcyclist who'd been speeding back and forth outside Parduski's house. On impact, the 82-year-old was thrown 10 meters 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 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.
Though preliminary, the WHO's findings suggest that long-term exposure to traffic noise may account for 3 percent of deaths from ischaemic heart disease in Europe -- typically strokes and 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. 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 to develop preliminary estimates of the impact of noise on the entire European population.
As well as the projections for deaths from heart disease, the researchers' figures suggest that 2 percent of Europeans suffer severely disturbed sleep because of noise pollution, and at least 15 percent suffer severe annoyance. The researchers calculate that chronic exposure to loud traffic noise causes 3 percent 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.
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 analyze 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.
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 digitized 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 United States, for example, neither the government nor the U.S. 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 City is leading the way in this respect. On July 1, 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 percent 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 U.S. "There are more and more anti-noise groups, and they're beginning to have an impact," she says.