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. 2018 Dec 2;15(12):2717.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph15122717.

A Systematic Review of the Basis for WHO's New Recommendation for Limiting Aircraft Noise Annoyance

Truls Gjestland  1
Affiliations

A Systematic Review of the Basis for WHO's New Recommendation for Limiting Aircraft Noise Annoyance

Truls Gjestland. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

The new WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region have recommendations for limiting noise exposure associated with adverse health effects. The limits are said to be based on a systematic review of existing evidence. This paper gives a systematic assessment of the presented evidence with respect to annoyance from aircraft noise. The new guidelines have been based on the results from a selection of existing aircraft noise studies. This paper demonstrates that a similar selection of other existing post-2000 studies will yield very different results. In addition, the validity of the presented evidence has been questioned as some of the referenced studies have not been conducted according to standardized methods, and the selection of respondents is not representative of the general airport population.

Keywords: WHO guidelines; aircraft noise; annoyance; dose–response; environment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Scatterplot of the response data from the 12 studies included in the WHO full dataset. The size of the markers corresponds to the number of respondents in the respective study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Dose–response curve for the WHO full dataset presented by Guski et al. compared with the corresponding CTL curve and the EU reference curve (Miedema & Vos) for aircraft noise annoyance.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Dose–response curve for 18 post-2000 surveys compared with the EU reference curve (Miedema & Vos) for aircraft noise annoyance.
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