/ 30 September 2008

Coping with our noisy world

John Stewart was living in south London six years ago when two things happened that seriously affected his health. “First the flight paths were changed so planes passed over my apartment every 90 seconds.

Then a nearby laundry centralised all its activities into one site, so the noise of the machines permeated the whole block. They were going all day and during the night,” he says.

“I had to have the radio and TV on, even if I didn’t want to, just so I didn’t have to hear the outside noise. My sleep became interrupted and I ended up getting heart palpitations. My doctor said my blood pressure was too high, he was very worried about my heart and I needed to take some serious action to reduce the stress before it killed me.” After Stewart moved house, he slowly got better.

There is growing evidence that noise-related stress is a significant public health hazard. According to a report from the World Health Organisation, unwanted noise causes hearing impairments including tinnitus, disturbs our sleep and triggers stress hormones that could in turn affect the immune system and metabolism.

It also makes us feel helpless and more aggressive and increases the chances of having a heart attack or stroke. In Europe, noise accounts for an estimated 3% of ischaemic heart disease — the most common cause of death in the European Union.

“There is increasing evidence that air and road traffic noise might be related to high blood pressure,” says Stephen Stansfeld, professor of psychiatry at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry in the United Kingdom. “Exposure in school to aircraft noise is also linked to reading impairment in children.” A study by Cornell University in New York found that workers in an open-plan office with constant exposure to hubbub from machinery, telephones and office chatter had higher levels of adrenaline in their urine than workers in a quiet, self-contained workstation. The open-plan group were also less effective at solving puzzles than the quiet group, who slept better, had better digestion and were less irritable.

“When people get annoyed by noise they get stressed,” says Stewart, who set up a pressure group, the UK Noise Association. “Constant exposure to even moderate levels of noise can be harmful. One Austrian study showed that children living on a main road had shorter concentration spans than those who didn’t.”

Small wonder, then, that noise is slowly inching up the political agenda. Last year, EU law required all cities in the union with populations of more than 250 000 to produce noise maps. “People think that we should live and let live and that only old people complain about noise,” says Richard Tur, one of a growing number of anti-noise activists and founder of the United States organisation NoiseOFF. “But we need to change our perception of what noise actually is — unwanted sound which can be physically harmful.”

The big offenders, says Stewart, are loud music, aircraft and traffic, and the problem seems to be getting worse. One report from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK showed that some parts of Sheffield were up to 10 times noisier than they had been 10 years earlier, while the UK Office of National Statistics suggests that noise complaints have increased fivefold in the past 20 years. —