Section 1 Noise Pollution

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

vehicle

loss [1].

actions.

**1. Introduction**

Personnel

Influence of Noise in Ambulance

Every day, noise is a ubiquitous potential hazard to our body. Importance is already dedicated early in history and still continues by steady investigations in terms of protecting the personnel in loud environment. "Worldwide, 16% of hearing loss in adults is attributed to occupational noise." Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a sensorineural hearing loss, explained by permanent threshold shift of hearing sensitivity. NIHL not only affects the auditory system but also has psychosocial effects and is proved to have interference with general health by sleep disturbances or cardiovascular symptoms. This study aims to detect and define the sound pressure levels that ambulance service workers are exposed to during their shifts in ambulance vehicle, especially with the focus on differences during signal and non-signal use and different speed levels and determining whether the noise has hazardous character. The collection of study data is composed of two parts. The first part is the indication of noise level in the ambulance vehicle with the help of a sound level meter. The second part included a questionnaire that constituted

Vehicles on Emergency Service

*Jānis Indulis Dundurs and Inka Janna Janssen*

14 questions sent electronically. In total, 207 workers responded.

**Keywords:** Noise-induced hearing loss, emergency service personnel, ambulance

During the eighteenth century with onset of rapid industrialisation, the incidence of NIHL increased drastically and lead to the first ideas of preventive

noise and hearing loss in relation to exposure time [2].

Almost 200 years later, the Hungarian biophysicist Georg von Békésy (1899–1972) analysed the travelling wave of sound in the cochlea, for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1961 and simultaneously set the cornerstone for the start of investigations of

Historically, the earliest descriptions about the danger of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) were described in 1713 by the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714). In his book "De Morbis Artificum" (Diseases of Workers), he firstly demonstrated the impact of hearing loss together in a relation to prolonged exposure to noise by his observations based on his examinations on coppersmith workers who were constantly exposed to noise and gradually suffered from hearing
