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Night Noise Guidelines For Europe
The World Health Organization’s working group on environmental noise, headed by Dr. Rokho Kim, has now made available its new night noise guidelines for Europe (pdf). This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and ambitious document that merits attention from anyone interested in the impact of noise on a host of physiological systems, and the kinds of measures that must be adopted to begin reducing its negative effects. Because these are night guidelines, the focus here is on the relationship between noise and sleep.
I’ve commented before on the fact that one of the most disturbing findings in recent studies aggregated by the WHO is that we do not have to be actually woken in order to be damaged by the noise we hear in our sleep. In the words of the guideline’s authors, ”Noise disturbs sleep by a number of direct and indirect pathways. Even at very low levels physilogical reactions (increase in heart rate, body movements and arousals) can be reliably measured.” The auditory system remains fully functional all the time that we’re unconscious.
The WHO working group summarizes its findings in the following conclusions:
• Sleep is a biological necessity and disturbed sleep is associated with a number of adverse impacts on health.
• There is sufficient evidence for biological effects of noise during sleep: increase in heart rate, arousals, sleep stage changes and awakening.
• There is sufficient evidence that night noise exposure causes self-reported sleep disturbance, increase in medicine use, increase in body movements and (environmental) insomnia.
• While noise-induced sleep disturbance is viewed as a health problem in itself (environmental insomnia), it also leads to further consequences for health and wellbeing.
• There is limited evidence that disturbed sleep causes fatigue, accidents and reduced performance.
• There is limited evidence that noise at night causes hormone level changes and clinical conditions such as cardiovascular illness, depression and other mental illness. It should be stressed that a plausible biological model is available with sufficient evidence for the elements of the causal chain.
One of the admirable aspects of this report is that the conclusions are drawn in a rigorous, conservative manner. But even with its scruples (driven in part by over-estimations on noise-related issues by some past research), the WHO report makes clear that the potential noise-related burden of disease on disparate populations is immense. The lighter sleep patterns of children and the elderly make them especially susceptible to many of the deleterious effects outlined in the document. To be sure, there are still many outstanding questions about factors such as heart attack risk in relation to both road and air traffic, and an important study on this point is now in progress; but the negative and potentially catastrophic effects of our elevated noise volumes are clear.
So what can be done? Actually, a great deal. Noise-sensitive rooms can be positioned on the quiet side of a dwelling. More effective sound insulation for bedroom windows, and better zoning could help. But all these things promise only a degree of help and when it comes to air traffic, in particular, we may never get very far unless we’re willing to cut down on the number of flights we take. At a moment when airports are only becoming more and more busy, this prospect seems unlikely.
A dispiriting report appeared in the Gothamist last week about the rise in air traffic volume over one Brooklyn neighborhood (Park Slope). Through the Freedom of Information Act, anti-noise activists have discovered that low volume air traffic over the Slope has risen 52% in just the past four years. This translates into virtually constant air traffic, and as one resident of the neighborhood told the Brooklyn Paper, “I play loud music in the house or otherwise I’ll go insane.” I’m sure this Brooklyn neighborhood is one of many around the city and around the country that could report similar surges in frequency of low-altitude airplane passovers. But most dispiriting of all were the comments readers posted to this piece. Virtually all of the comments are from people saying either that they live in the neighborhood and don’t notice the noise and (therefore) people should stop whining about it, or from people noting how much louder it is in many other places and (therefore) people in Park Slope should stop whining about it.
As the WHO guidelines indicate, neither one’s own failure to be woken by the noise, nor the fact that noise might be louder elsewhere invalidates the fact that this noise is sufficient to play havoc with our bodies and lives. What the commentators telling the activists to “get over it” don’t get is that their ability to tough it out mentally macho urban style does nothing to safeguard their blood pressure, the potential changes taking place in their hormone levels, the neurocognitive/performance effects that disrupted sleep may be causing, even when they’re not aware of being woken–the accidents that they might be prone to, the depression risks, etc., etc.
Just because you’re a bonafide wimpless Alpha Type doesn’t mean noise is not degrading your health just as much as it is the health of the person complaining against the growing environmental hazards of our soundscape.
The WHO study aptly cites a verse by the first-century Roman poet Juvenal:
The sick die here because they can’t sleep. For when does sleep come with rented rooms? It costs a lot of money to sleep in this city! That’s why everyone’s sick. Carts clattering through the winding streets, curses hurled at some herd standing still in the middle of the road could rob Caesar or a seal of their sleep!
Noise is a perennial problem in the history of human civilization. But that truth should not blind us to the fact that traffic noise levels are now far higher and more constant than they were in Juvenal’s Rome. If Caesar and the seals weren’t sleeping in the first century, one shudders to think how dysfunctional the empire might have become on account of the noise-related sleep deprivation we face today. Well, perhaps the U.S. Congress gives us some indication of what that scenario might look like. And we can only pity the seals in our grossly noise-polluted seas…
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