by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
This essay by pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, describes how she became a detective and public health activist after detecting high lead levels in her patients’ blood in Flint, Michigan.
It reminded me of how I became a noise activist after reading an article about hyperacusis, a medical condition in which noise causes pain at sound levels not perceived as painful by others.
Just as with the safe lead level being known but ignored, the safe noise exposure level to prevent hearing loss has been known since at least 1974, but ignored by regulators and public health authorities after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control was defunded by Congress during the deregulatory era that was the Reagan years. It took me a year to figure out what the safe noise exposure level was to prevent hearing loss.
Fortunately, public health authorities have begun to recognize the dangers of noise exposure for the public. As this report shows, noise has adverse non-auditory health effects and may be causally associated with dementia.
But we must pressure our elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels to set safe noise exposure standards, and then to enforce these, to protect the health of ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
