Photo credit: Ketut Subiyanto
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Healthline has an excellent article about the dangers of noise for health. In addition to causing hearing loss, tinnitus, and hyperacusis, loud noise has non-auditory health effects, including hypertension, heart disease, and increased mortality. These effects have been known for years and are now known to be related to the body’s involuntary stress responses to noise, understood down to the molecular level.
A quieter world is entirely possible. Laws and regulations governing road traffic noise, ambient noise levels in public spaces like restaurants and movie theaters, concert halls and sports venues, and anti-social behavior laws such as those currently in place in the UK actually work. As our colleague Arline Bronzaft, PhD, often says, “We have the ways to make the world quieter. We just lack the will.”
A quieter world will be a better and healthier world for all.
Thanks to our friends Tracy and Anthony Williams for letting us know about the Healthline piece.
