Once noise pollution becomes the norm, the areas surrounding a hub of noise pollution will often start to get noisier and noisier themselves. In this way, noise pollution spreads far and wide and it becomes harder and harder to find a place that is quiet.
Noise pollution creates a number of physical and mental ailments in a man. Noise pollution or sound Pollution may lead to human health hazards such as:
1. Fatigue of the hearing or auditory sense organs: Sound around 90 decibels (ab) creates fatigue of the hearing organs.
2. Hearing problems, deafness: It is well known that operating noisy equipment can damage the eardrums and lead to burst or weakened eardrums, hearing difficulties and (even, in the long run), total hearing loss. Sometimes, this can be temporary and reversible, healing once the noise pollution is removed. Often, however, it is irreversible and thus causes life long difficulties. Prolonged living in an area infested with sound pollution may gradually induce deafness. When deafness is caused owing to one’s profession, it is then called processional deafness.
3. Various other physical or mental losses: Sound pollution is prone to distort the natural tempo of our speech. People may experience difficulty while speaking. Generally the explosive sound produced by the vehicular traffic and the air-planes tends to produce such problems.
4. Annoyance: Sound pollution produces such annoyance. A nervous sort of a man of course, is by nature more prone to such discomfiture and discomfort. Excessive sound pollution makes one irritated, and a sort of unnaturalness and excitement is marked in one’s behavior.
5. Tired and exhaustion: A man feels tired and exhausted in a state of prolonged sound pollution. Those who engaged in different professions suffer from mental exhaustion or apathy in work and these tendencies gradually tells upon their efficiency and this factor may deprive the sufferer of his power of audibility in the long run.
6. Physiological losses: Sound pollution may induce in human body various types of temporary physiological changes, such as hypertension, change of the rate of heart-beat, high respiratory rates, excessive perspiration, vomitary tendency, vertigo and exhaustion. Sound pollution disturb sleep, too and as such, memory too runs short.
7. Displacement of communities: If an area of land become industrialized and as a result becomes a source of noise pollution, then this can cause the people who used to live in the area to migrate in large numbers in order to escape the noise.
Edited with inputs from various writers.