An invisible killer in all our lives

We are surrounded by an invisible killer. One is so common that we hardly notice that it limits our lives.

It causes heart attacks, type 2 diabetes and studies now until it connects them to dementia.

What do you think can be?

The answer is noise – and its effect on the human body goes beyond harmful hearing.

“It is a general health crisis, we have large numbers of people in their daily lives,” says Professor Charlotte Clark of Saint George University at the University of London.

It is just a crisis that we do not talk about.

Therefore, I was investigating when the noise becomes dangerous, as I spoke with the people who are healthy and know if there is any way to overcome our loud world.

I started to meet Professor Clark in a silent voice laboratory. We will see how my body interacts with noise, and it is equipped with a device that resembles a silent smart watch.

It will measure the heart rate and the amount of sweating of my skin.

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

The person I really find is the traffic noise from Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has the title of the most noble city in the world. I feel immediately as if I am in desirable traffic congestion.

And sensors pick up my incitement – the heart rate shoots and my skin is more sweating.

Professor Clark says: “There is a really good evidence that traffic noise affects your heart health,” where the following sound is prepared.

Only the stadium sounds have a calming effect on my body. Park dogs and the neighbor’s party in the early hours lead to a negative response.

But why does my body change?

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

The sound is discovered by the ear and is transferred to the brain, and performs one area – the amygdala – emotional evaluation.

This is part of the body’s response or flying that has evolved to help us quickly respond to sounds such as the predator that is shattered through the bushes.

“Therefore, the heart rate rises, the nervous system begins to kick and export stress hormones,” says Professor Clark.

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

Professor Clark says: “If you are exposed to several years, the reaction of your body like that all the time, it increases the risk of developing things like heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes,” says Professor Clark.

Shortly, this happens even while we sleep quickly. You may think you adapt to noise. I thought I did when I lived in a rental near the airport. But biology tells a different story.

“You never extinguish your ears, when you are asleep, you still listen. So those responses, like high heart rate, this happens during a sleeping,” Professor Clark adds.

Noise is undesirable. Transport – traffic, trains and aircraft – it is a major source, but also our voices that have spent a fun time. A great person’s party is the noise of another unbearable person.

Coco met her apartment on the fourth floor in the historic VILA De Gràcia region in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

There is a newly chosen lemon bag linked to its gifted door by one of the neighbors. The refrigerator contains a cooked tortilla by another, and it offers me the luxurious cakes made by a third neighbor trained in Patisserie.

From the balcony, you can see the famous cathedral in the city, Sagrada Familia. It is easy to see why Coco fell in love with living here, but she comes at a big price and believes that she will have to leave.

“It’s very noisy … it’s 24 -hour noise,” she told me. There is a dog garden for owners to walk on their boxes that “bark in 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning”, and the courtyard is a public space used in everything from children’s birthday parties to concerted concerts throughout the day.

Her phone comes out and plays music recordings that are detonated loudly to make the glass in its windows shake.

Her house should be a shelter of work pressure, but the noise “brings frustration, I feel crying.”

She was “hospitalized twice with chest pain” and “completely” that she believes that noise causes stress, which harms her health. “There is a physical change I feel,” she says.

In Barcelona, ​​there is an estimated 300 heart attack and only 30 deaths annually from traffic noise, according to researcher Dr. Maria Forster, who reviewed evidence of noise for the World Health Organization.

All over Europe The noise is linked to 12,000 early deaths per year, in addition to millions of severe disturbed sleep, as well as the disturbance of the serious noise that can affect mental health.

I met Dr. Forster in a café separated from one of the busiest most busy ways in Barcelona from a small garden. My sound scale says that the noise resulting from remote traffic is slightly more than 60 decibels here.

We can easily chat about noise without raising our voices, but this is already an unhealthy folder.

The decisive number of heart health told me 53 dB, and the higher the health risks.

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

This only during the day, we need even lower levels of sleep. “At night we need calm,” she says.

Although it is not only related to size, how inconvenience of sound and the amount of control that you have more affects our emotional response to noise.

Dr. Forster argues that the healthy effect of noise is “at the level of air pollution” but it is difficult to understand.

“We are used to understanding that chemicals can affect health and that they are toxic, but it is not impossible to understand that the physical factor, like noise, affects our health outside our hearing,” she says.

The tumultuous end can be the pleasure that makes life worth living and no other unbearable noise.

The traffic sound has the greatest effect on health because many people are exposed to it. But traffic is also the sound of access to work, shopping and moving children to school. Treatment of noise means asking people to live their lives differently – which creates its own problems.

Dr. Natalie Muller, from the Barcelona International Health Institute, takes me to walk throughout the city center. We start on a crowded road-watches of my audio meters at more than 80 dB-and we go to a quiet road lining up on the ground where the noise reaches the fifties.

But there is something different from this street – that was a crowded road, but the space was granted to pedestrians, cafes and gardens. I can see the ghost of ancient crosses in the form of a flower. The vehicles can still go here slowly.

Remember earlier in the laboratory, we found that some sounds can calm the body.

“This is not completely silent, but it is a different imagination of sound and noise,” says Dr. Muller. The heart rate decreased and stopped sweating.

The initial plan was to create more than 500 regions like this, called “Superblocks” – pedestrian friendly areas created by collecting many city blocs together.

Dr. Muller The research conducted Decrease a 5-10 % decrease in the city’s noise, which prevents about “150 early deaths” from noise alone every year. This will be “just a tip of the iceberg” of health benefits.

But in fact, only six super groups were built. The city council refused to comment.

The risk of noise although it continues to grow. Urbanization puts more people in noisy cities.

Daka, Bangladesh, is one of the fastest growing growth in the world. This has brought more traffic and giving the city of the pioneering pioneering music from the centuries that ring.

Momina Raman Royal got the “Lone Hero” brand, where his silent protests focused on the problem of the noise of the city.

For 10 minutes each day, he stands at the intersection of two crowded roads with a large yellow banner accusing drivers who honor their horns loudly from causing a huge inconvenience.

Take the task after his birth. “I want to stop increasing not only from Dhaka, but from Bangladesh,” he says.

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

But here there are the beginnings of political action as well. Syed Razwana Hassan, an environmental advisor and minister of government of Bangladesh, told me that she is “very concerned” about the health effects of noise.

There are a campaign on comprehensive centuries to reduce noise levels – with a more strict awareness and enforcement campaign of current laws.

She said: “It is impossible to do this in one 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 they are less noisy, I am sure that their habit will change too.”

Noise solutions can be difficult, complex and challenged.

What I left is a new appreciation for finding some space in our lives to escape noise because Dr. Masrur Abdul Quader, from the University of Bangladesh for professionals, is “a silent killer and slow thickness.”

Loudly was produced by Jerry Holt. Additional reports from Bangladesh by Salman Saeed