Photo credit: Paul Sableman licensed under CC BY 2.0
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
The Quiet Coalition’s board member and co-founder Arline Bronzaft, PhD, has an important article in the latest issue of The Hearing Journal.
Noise bothers people but it’s more than a nuisance. It is a public health hazard causing auditory disorders, such as hearing loss, tinnitus, hyperacusis, and non-auditory health problems, like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and death.
The scientific data about these problems and the causal nature of the relationships between noise and human disease is overwhelming.
There is always a need for more research, but there can be no rational doubt about the data. And the engineering techniques to make things quieter have been known since the 1960s. Making the world quieter is a political problem, not a scientific problem.
Those of us old enough to remember when restaurants, offices, planes, trains, and buses were filled with unwanted cigarette smoke know that banning smoking in public spaces has made the air we breathe cleaner, with dramatic impacts on health and well-being.
As with smoke, it will be with noise. If enough people complain to enough elected officials, or run for public office on a platform of making the world a quieter place, it can be made quieter, too.
