Excessive Noise And Vibration At Work Causes Long-term Problems

The effects of excess noise and vibrations on the American worker have long been a major concern for sufferers and health professionals. Repeated exposure to unnatural levels of sound can cause severe long-term problems. Here is a bit more about it.

Some of the health hazards associated with excess noise and vibration exposure include: hearing impairment, hypertension, annoyance, and sleep disturbance.

Hearing impairment is fairly self-explanatory: too much noise causes trauma to the cochlea in the inner ear, and that damage is sadly irreversible. This is why aging rock stars suffer deafness so often: the repeated unprotected exposure they had to unnaturally amplified music over long periods of time was bound to take its toll.

Although the specific reasons for noise-induced hypertension are still being debated, it is clear that the annoyance of repeated exposure to loud noise constricts the heart vessels and causes high blood pressure. This may be due to increased adrenaline production or other factors, but the upshot is that the increased volume in a person's daily life can also cause headaches, fatigue, stomach ulcers, and even vertigo. Hearing the noises over and over in one's mind, even when they are no longer present, may also bring about sleep disturbance.

OSHA has long required workers to be protected in the workplace, but the problem has been one of technology. For example, animal shelter employees can wear noise cancellation earphones to help reduce the amount of disturbance they suffer. The earphones will block the noise from the barking, but it also blocks the noise if someone wants to talk to them! There is no practicality and flexibility to the product under different noise conditions: the earphones simply shut out ALL noise.

In the case of those who operate heavy machinery, the consequences of shutting out all noise in order to protect from the most damaging frequencies can be dangerous in and of itself. There is a real need for cancelling the constant low frequency levels of noise while keeping the process practical and applicable in a variety of contexts.

Some of the new technologies in the noise reduction field are very promising. There are now products available that can discern the differences between low level and higher level noises; they can block one while allowing for the other. These products are installed in, say, the cab of a vehicle so that the overall environment is quieter and eliminate the need for bulky and cumbersome earphones.

The field of noise reduction is one that is continuously changing and technologies are always improving. Hopefully, there will come a time when hearing loss and other related hazards will be a thing of the past for those whose lives are most affected.