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The Sound of Traffic Alone Can Kill You

Noise pollution can kill you or at least contribute to killing you over a long period of time. New studies are showing that noise pollution—mostly, the buzz of highways and road traffic—can prevent sleep and inflict some pretty serious damage on the...

Noise pollution can kill you. Or at least contribute to killing you over a long period of time. New studies are showing that noise pollution—mostly, the buzz of highways and road traffic—can prevent sleep and inflict some pretty serious damage on the human body.

Here’s NPR, via Planetizen:

Too many bad nights’ sleep can raise the risk of heart attack, high blood pressure and other ailments. Curious researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wondered how many people in Fulton County, Ga., where Atlanta is the county seat, are exposed to highway noise levels that have been shown to cause sleep disturbances. The answer: about 2.3 percent of the population, or more than 21,000 people, are likely to be exposed to noise that’s highly disruptive to sleep. “Good mental health and sufficient restful sleep are important,” says James Holt, an epidemiologist and geographer with the CDC. A paper about the findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. “If we look at all the factors that affect our health and well-being, environmental noise is important,” he says.

Traffic isn’t the only thing that can screw with your sleep, either, obviously. Construction, squawking birds, crowd noise, and so forth can all contribute to the killer cacophony.

Now, 21,000 people in Atlanta suffering from excess noise pollution is a bummer, but the brunt of the implications raised by this study certainly fall on the populations of the developing world, where more people are crammed together and sound is less well buffered. The traffic-choked streets of Sao Paulo and Beijing are probably giving way more than 20K people nightmares, and maybe, if the CDC’s right on, heart attacks too.

It’s yet another element for communities and urban planners to consider as they map the transportation infrastructure, plan throughways, and weigh the pros and cons of running traffic corridors through residential areas; no one should have to live in the thick of killer noise pollution.