LOUD: Is noise an invisible killer?
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
BBC health correspondent James Gallagher investigates how our noisy world is damaging our health. He finds out why noise increases our risk of health problems, like heart attacks, sleep problems and anxiety, and can even affect how long we live. James spends two days in Barcelona – one of the noisiest cities in Europe – to meet the people whose health is being ruined by noise and the scientists and doctors trying to solve the problem. He also visits London to be experimented on in a lab to find out how noise changes the body, and hears from Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, one of the loudest places on the planet.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are we surrounded by an invisible killer? |
| 0:04.9 | Something so every day that we don't even notice it. |
| 0:12.2 | And yet slowly but surely it's chipping away at our health and even killing people. |
| 0:21.9 | I'm James Gallagher and this is Loud from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:25.7 | I have noticed more and more research showing the damaging impact that noise has on our health. |
| 0:32.6 | And I'm not just talking about our ears here, not our hearing, |
| 0:36.1 | but something that runs deeper, something that affects the whole of our body and our mind as well. |
| 0:42.4 | I've got two days here in the Spanish city of Barcelona. |
| 0:46.1 | It's one of the noisiest cities in Europe |
| 0:48.3 | to investigate when and how noise can be bad for us. |
| 0:54.0 | But first, I want to assess the sounds of this city. |
| 1:05.6 | While I'm walking around Barcelona, I want you to think about all the noise in your life as well. |
| 1:11.6 | And what I've got in my pocket is a little metre. |
| 1:14.1 | It's a sound metre. |
| 1:15.1 | And what it's going to do is record the decibels. |
| 1:17.2 | That's a way of measuring the sound in all the different places in the city. |
| 1:20.8 | So something that's like 30 or 40 would be quite quiet. |
| 1:24.2 | Anything getting close to 100 is going to be really loud. |
| 1:26.7 | So let's see what we find. |
| 1:35.1 | So while you're on the metro, it's about 70 decibels, |
| 1:38.0 | but as soon as you get off and you're on the platform, |
| 1:39.9 | the din is about 85 decibels. |
... |
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