The invisible murderer in all our lives

We are surrounded by an invisible murderer. One so common that we barely notice it shortening our lives.

It is causing heart attacks, type 2 diabetes and studies now even link it to dementia.

What do you think could be?

The answer is noise, and its impact on the human body goes far beyond harmful hearing.

“It is a public health crisis, we have a large number of people exposed in their daily lives,” says Professor Charlotte Clark, from St George’s, University of London.

It is just a crisis we don’t talk about.

So I have been investigating when the noise becomes dangerous, chatting with people whose health is suffering and seeing if there is any way to overcome our noisy world.

I started gathering Professor Clark in a disturbingly silent sound laboratory. Let’s see how my body reacts to noise and I have been equipped with a device that looks like a thick smart watch.

It will measure my heart rate and how much my skin sweats.

You can also join if you have some headphones. Think about how these five sounds make you feel.

The one who really encourages is the traffic noise of Dhaka, Bangladesh, who has the most noisy city title in the world. I immediately feel that I am in a traffic jam prayed and stressful.

And the sensors are collecting my agitation: my heart rate shoots and my skin is sweating more.

“There is really good evidence that traffic noise affects the health of his heart,” says Professor Clark, while preparing the next sound.

Only the cheerful sounds of the recess patio have a soothing effect on my body. Ladran dogs and the neighbor’s party in the early hours lead to a negative response.

But why does the sound change my body?

“You have an emotional response to sound,” says Professor Clark.

The ear detects the sound and passes to the brain and a region, the amygdala, performs the emotional evaluation.

This is part of the fight or flight response that has evolved to help us react rapidly to sounds as a predator that crashes for the bushes.

“Then its heart rate increases, its nervous system begins to activate and release stress hormones,” Professor Clark tells me.

All this is good in an emergency, but over time it begins to cause damage.

“If it is exposed for several years, your body is reacting thus all the time, its risk of developing things such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes increases,” says Professor Clark.

Insidiously, this even happens while we are deeply asleep. You might think you adapt to noise. I thought I did it when I lived in a rental near an airport. But biology tells a different story.

“You never go out; when you are asleep, you are still listening. So those answers, like your heart rate, that is happening while you are asleep,” adds Professor Clark.

Noise is unwanted sound. Transportation: traffic, trains and airplanes) are an important source, but so are the sounds that we had a good time. One person’s great party is the insufferable noise of another.

I meet Coco on his fourth floor floor in the historic Vila area of ​​Gràcia in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

There is a bag of newly collected lemons tied to his door given by a neighbor, his refrigerator contains an omelet cooked by another and offers me elegant cakes made by a third neighbor who is training in bakery.

From the balcony you can see the famous city cathedral, the sacred family. It is easy to see why Coco has fallen in love with living here, but has a great price and believes that he will be forced to leave.

“It’s extremely noisy … it’s 24 -hour noise,” he tells me. There is a dog park for the owners to walk with their dogs that “bark at 2, 3, 4, 5 am” and the patio is a public space that is used for everything, from children’s birthday parties to concerts of all day finished with fireworks.

She takes out her phone and touches the recordings of music that is exploded so strong that it makes the glass in its windows vibrate.

Your home must be a work stress refuge, but the noise “brings frustration, I want to cry.”

She has been “hospitalized twice with chest pain” and “absolutely” thinks that noise is causing stress, which is damaging her health. “There is a physical change that I feel, does something to her body, with certainty,” she says.

In Barcelona there is an estimate of 300 heart attacks and 30 deaths a year only for traffic noise, according to the researcher Dr. Maria Fanaster, who has reviewed evidence about the noise for the World Health Organization.

Throughout Europe The noise is linked to 12,000 early deaths per year, as well as millions of severely disturbed sleep cases, as well as a great noise discomfort that can affect mental health.

I know Dr. Foraster in a coffee that is separated from one of the busiest roads in Barcelona next to a small park. My sound meter says that the noise of distant traffic is just over 60 decibels here.

We can easily chat on noise without raising our voices, but this is already a unhealthy volume.

The crucial number for heart health is 53 decibels, it tells me, and the higher, the greater the health risks will be.

“This 53 means that we need to be in a quite quiet environment,” says Dr. Foraster.

And that is only during the day, we need even lower levels to sleep. “At night we need tranquility,” she says.

Although it is not just the volume, how disruptive the sound is and how much control has on it affects our emotional response to noise.

Dr. Foraster argues that the impact on noise health is “on the level of air pollution”, but it is much more difficult to understand.

“We are used to understanding that chemicals can affect health and are toxic, but it is not so easy to understand that a physical factor, such as noise, affects our health beyond our audition,” she says.

A noisy party can be the fun that makes it worth living the life and intolerable noise of another person.

The sound of traffic has the greatest impact on health because many people are exposed to him. But traffic is also the sound of getting to work, shopping and bringing children to school. Addressing noise means asking people to live their lives differently, which creates their own problems.

Dr. Natalie Mueller, from the Global Health Institute of Barcelona, ​​leads me to walk through the city center. We start on a busy road, my sound meter has more than 80 decibels, and we go to a quiet wooded road where the noise is reduced to the 50s.

But there is something different on this street: it used to be a busy road, but the space was delivered to pedestrians, coffee shops and gardens. I can see the ghost of an old cross for the shape of the parties of the flowers. Vehicles can still get here, only slowly.

Remember before in the laboratory, we find that some sounds can calm the body.

“It is not completely silent, but it is a different perception of sound and noise,” says Dr. Mueller.

The initial plan was to create more than 500 areas like this, called “Superblocks”: friendly pedestrian areas created by grouping several blocks of the city.

Dr. Mueller He conducted the investigation Projecting a 5-10% reduction in noise in the city, which would avoid approximately “150 premature deaths” only for noise every year. And that would be “only the tip of the iceberg” of health benefits.

But in reality, only six superbloques were built. The City Council declined to comment.

However, the dangers of noise continue to grow. Urbanization is putting more people in noisy cities.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, is one of the fastest growing megacities in the world. This has brought more traffic and has given the city a cacofonic soundtrack of horn horns.

The artist Momina Raman Royal obtained the “lonely hero” label, since his silent protests have focused attention on the noise problem of the city.

For about 10 minutes every day, he stops at the intersection of a couple of crowded roads with a great yellow pancarde accusing drivers who touch the horns aloud to cause a massive discomfort.

He assumed the mission after his daughter was born. “I want to stop touching not only Dhaka, but also Bangladesh,” he says.

“If you see birds, trees or rivers, no one is making noise without humans, so humans are responsible.”

But here there are also beginnings of political action. Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who is the Environmental Advisor and Minister of the Bangladesh government, told me that she was “very worried” about the impacts on the health of noise.

There is an offensive in the horn horn to reduce noise levels, with an awareness campaign and a stricter application of existing laws.

She said: “It is impossible to do it in a year or two years, but I think it is possible to make sure that the city becomes less noisy, and when people feel that, they feel better when it is less noisy, I am sure that their habit will also change.”

Noise solutions can be difficult, complicated and difficult to solve.

What I have left is a new appreciation for finding some space in our lives to escape the noise because in the words of Dr. Masrur Abdul Quader, of the University of Professionals of Bangladesh, he is “a silent murderer and a slow poison.”

Loud was produced by Gerry Holt. Additional reports from Bangladesh by Salman Saeed