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Melissa Harris-Perry: The year, 1987. The artists, Public Enemy. The message, Turn it up! Bring the noise! If you live in an American city, it probably feels like everything around you took this message literally. There's nonstop construction [construction noise], irritated drivers stuck in traffic [hooting], planes flying overhead [plane noise]. Don't think you can just escape to the burbs because have you heard those leaf blowers? [blower noise] Turns out that all this noise is a very real public enemy.

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For decades scientists have been sounding the alarm on noise, specifically noise pollution, as far back as 1978. Former US Surgeon General William Stewart said, "Calling noise a nuisance is like calling smog an inconvenience." In the decades since Stewart's warning, multiple studies have underscored the hazard that noise pollution poses to our health and environment. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we begin today with a whisper instead of a bang because we're talking noise pollution on The Takeaway.

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We're joined now by Rick Neitzel, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan. Professor Neitzel, so great to have you here.

Professor Neitzel: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here, Melissa.

Melissa: All right. What do we mean when we say noise in this context? How do you define noise?

Professor Neitzel: Noise historically has been defined as simply unwanted sound, which can take many, many forms, of course. More recently a group of, I would say, advocates and researchers have begun using a definition that's a bit more inclusive of health impacts. Now we would say noise is unwanted or potentially harmful sound, noting that even if sound isn't annoying it can still be harmful to your health.

Melissa: Give me an example of sound that might be harmful to our health that we don't necessarily acknowledge or recognize as annoying.

Professor Neitzel: Well, certainly we can have sound in the background from road traffic, air traffic, rail traffic, construction sites that may not rise to the point of annoyance but could still be potentially loud enough to harm us. Certainly, many of us work in noisy workplaces and we may not find that noise annoying, but that noise can absolutely be harmful as well.

Melissa: What are some of the main sources of noise pollution?

Professor Neitzel: For communities in the US, and indeed around the world, the sources I mentioned a moment ago: so road traffic, traffic from airplanes overhead, rail traffic, construction. Those are the four predominant sources of noise, at least in terms of annoyance, but we also have to recognize that there are other sources out there that are relatively unprecedented in human history. For example, wind turbines are a source of noise that are emerging and are quite appropriately being installed for green energy and sustainability but represent, again, a type of noise source that really hasn't been in human existence beyond the past few decades.

Melissa: Oh, that's interesting. Something that we might be installing or engaging for the purpose of actually improving our environmental conditions could also have unintended negative externalities, harms that we didn't mean for them to have?

Professor Neitzel: That's absolutely right, and I'll give you an example. Most people recognize that urban density is necessary for sustainability, but on the flip side, the more dense our urban environments become the noisier they tend to become. There's an active trade-off there between increased sustainability and increased noise, and for this reason, I would advocate for greater focus on noise. We want to, of course, increase sustainability, but we don't want to have other health impacts come along with that, for example, due to noise exposures.

Melissa: You're speaking here primarily about urban environments. This was a conversation as we were putting this research together, and much of the team of The Takeaway lives in cities. I happen to live in a kind of smallish city, somewhat more rural environment, much less dense. Is this a problem also in suburban and rural environments?

Professor Neitzel: Much of the research that's been done historically has focused on urban environments. As you probably know, in the year 2008, 50% of the global human population lived in urban areas, and that number has increased since then. Urban areas have been a focus because it's where the majority of humankind dwells. Certainly, there have been many studies from myself and other researchers around the world documenting that urban areas do present high noise exposure potential.

The problem with rural areas is not necessarily that they're quiet but just that we have not studied them. You might imagine that a rural environment could in fact be quieter, maybe it has less road traffic or less air traffic noise, but it might be, for example, that rural residents are more likely to have a noisy job, say in agriculture or construction. It may be that they have the same exposure, it's simply coming from different sources; perhaps from work instead of from the ambient environment.

Melissa: I want to talk about one more aspect of the ambient environment, and that is electronics. Recently we had a hurricane kind of on the back end of a hurricane, we had a power outage. I was stunned at how quiet the house suddenly sounded without the refrigerator, without the computers, without any of the devices being plugged in and, I suppose, making this buzz that I normally notice. Is that just annoyance or is that part of the noise pollution equation?

Professor Neitzel: I would say that's absolutely part of the equation. We did a study, some colleagues at Columbia University and I, back in 2012 in New York City looking at different sources of noise exposure. We found that for the majority of people, music from electronic devices was actually their predominant source of exposure. There is this potential for perhaps levels to reach high enough to cause hearing loss from listening to music, but you're absolutely right, we also have this constant background hum around us, not from personal listening devices but from the refrigerators and other electronic devices.

It tends to fade into the background. We cognitively screen it out until, as you point out, we're faced with a scenario where the noise is no longer there, and then its absence becomes quite obvious as you've noticed.

Melissa: Why hasn't noise pollution gotten the same level of attention as other public health concerns?

Professor Neitzel: That's a marvelous question. I would say, or at least my personal opinion is that because noise isn't associated with lethal effects - we don't think of noise as causing cancer or other very dreadful health outcomes - we've tended to ignore it. Now, noise absolutely does cause debilitating health outcomes. I think Americans, somewhat uniquely in the world, tend to write off hearing as being an important sense, but in fact, it's critical, and hearing loss is a debilitating health outcome.

I am hopeful that as our epidemiological understanding of the impacts of noise exposure expands, we will start to recognize that actually noise is very strongly linked now to things like high blood pressure, heart attacks, and stroke. It's increasingly linked to mental health and psychiatric disorders, and potentially things like diabetes and preterm birth. While noise historically has been easy to ignore because, again, it doesn't cause us to bleed, it doesn't cause diseases that at least in America we view as being unacceptable, now that we're starting to recognize, "Hey, some of the top killers of Americans like heart attacks, like strokes, actually are linked to noise," I'm hoping that we can raise its profile and get it to be considered on par with air pollution and water pollution, which also, of course, are quite important forms of environmental hazards.

Melissa: We're talking right now about noise pollution with Rick Neitzel, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan. Rick, when you say that it's linked, that noise is linked to this variety of outcomes, whether it's diabetes or heart disease or preterm birth, is that link at this point correlational, or do you have at least a hunch, a hypothesis around some arrow of causality? How would noise exposure be connected to, for example, heart attacks and strokes?

Professor Neitzel: From an epidemiological perspective there's a couple of things we look for here. One is we want to have different study designs to look at these associations, for example, between noise and cardiovascular effects. We also want to look at different human populations, and ideally, we do want to establish causality. The good news here, at least from a research perspective, is there is a host of evidence, both correlational as you suggest but also causal, where we look at the development of health impacts over time as people are exposed to noise.

The summation of that evidence is such that I think there's a pretty convincing link here that not only are these things associated but that in fact, noise is causing them.

Melissa: Are there policy solutions? Are there ways to intervene?

Professor Neitzel: There are absolutely policies. Examples here would be regulations on how much noise can legally be permitted to be emitted from sources like cars, wind turbines, and things along those lines. There are physical changes we can make to the infrastructure. We can start using, for example, quieter pavement on roads. We can make increased use of barriers on the sides of roads. We can do as the Federal Aviation Administration has already done, regulations that lower by law the noise that can be emitted by jet engines. We can educate consumers and the public to help protect themselves and be aware of the risks of noise. Lots of different options.

No one of them is going to be a silver bullet; we probably need to implement all of them. Really all that's lacking at this point, I think, is the recognition that noise is in fact an important problem, and the political will to actually do something about it.

Melissa: When I hear you say one of the things we could do is create policies that limit the amount of noise that can be emitted, my gentrification hackles go up and I think, "Ugh, what if one community understands--" particularly, again, what you've said about music before, "understands some kinds of sounds to be deeply connected to who they are and to their culture and their community, and another group perceives it as noise?" How might we in a policy context manage that challenge?

Professor Neitzel: It is a challenge, you're absolutely right. One person's music can absolutely be another person's noise. I think this is something we need to tread on very carefully. I'll also highlight there are many situations in the US where a community has moved in, or as you say, gentrified in an area that already had high noise, and then once they've moved in realized, "Oh, this noise is offensive to us." I think there are absolutely cultural issues here. I'm thinking of examples of housing developments growing in around a shooting range or an airport and then becoming disturbed by that noise.

To the degree that a sound that's out there is desirable, certainly we don't want to take that away. My argument is primarily to eliminate things like construction noise and transportation noise rather than music, which has such huge cultural importance.

I think there do need to be considerations there. I'm not advocating that we need to move to a silent environment by any means, but you're absolutely right that these factors need to be considered so we can thoughtfully design and implement policies, again, that are designed to protect health but not just to suppress noise that makes people joyful, for example, like music does.

Melissa: Or like The Takeaway. [chuckles] Rick Neitzel is a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan, and is not advocating for the end of radio. [laughs] Rick, thanks for joining us.

Professor Neitzel: Thank you so much.

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