Thank you for inviting me. I think I'll speak in English, because I understand that that's the majority, but I'm happy to answer questions in English or French.
I'm a public health physician. I'm at the Montreal public health unit. I was invited here because we've done work on the health impacts of environmental noise, and more specifically airplane noise. I want to go through, from a public health perspective, how we see noise from aircraft as being an important issue and where we think there's work to be done in order to improve public health.
At Public Health, we've been working on this for about 10 years. It starts, actually, from community noise complaints. It comes from people who called us to say they think there's something going on here and they would like us to investigate. Building from that, we've been able to develop a lot of knowledge in Montreal about the real impacts.
At an international level, it's very clear. The World Health Organization just put out, actually, their new noise guidelines about a month ago. In the lead-up to that, they did a lot of scientific work over the last year, looking at the health impacts of various environmental noise sources. I want to focus specifically on what they found in terms of scientific evidence for aircraft noise.
There's high-quality evidence, which means many studies that go in the same direction, that indicates a link between noise from aircraft and what is called “annoyance”. Annoyance can maybe sound like something that isn't specifically a public health concern, but if you live in a place that is noisy and have lived there for a while, you know that annoyance over time is something that really does affect quality of life and is related to other health impacts.
Second is sleep disturbance. On this, there's what the WHO calls moderate-quality evidence. That means there are fewer studies, but they do go in the direction of a link between aircraft noise and disturbed sleep.
What's even more concerning is that, in the long term, there is now moderate-quality evidence that aircraft noise specifically has impacts on cardiovascular health. That includes hypertension, or high blood pressure. It includes stroke. It includes heart disease. Some of that is really being annoyed for 30 years by noise in the environment. It generates stress. It generates high blood pressure. It can lead to heart disease but also disturbed sleep. We know that disturbed sleep dysregulates the body and can result in hypertension and heart disease. Also, important in the current context is that it can lead to obesity. There's starting to be better evidence about the links between chronic noise exposure and obesity.
There's less good evidence about cognitive impacts—that includes in children but also in adults—as well as mental health and quality of life.
Just to put some numbers to it, we know that about 60% of the residents on the Island of Montreal are exposed to noise levels that may have impacts on their health. For aircraft noise, more specifically, we have almost 5,000 units with about 10,000 to 12,000 people who live inside what is called the NEF 25, or noise exposure forecast of 25. They're in a zone close to the airport, where we know there are likely to be impacts. About 6% of the people on the Island of Montreal, or one person in 15, say they are highly annoyed by noise, and about 2%, or one person in 50, report that they have their sleep disturbed by airplane noise. This is specifically for airplane noise.
Those numbers can seem small, until you think about how few people actually live close to the airport out of the 2 million people on the Island of Montreal. If you look at distance to the airport, about 40% of the people who live in that NEF 25 report being highly annoyed by noise, and 20% of the people live within two kilometres of the airport. So you're getting people who live pretty far from the airport reporting that they're highly annoyed.
From a public health perspective, that brings us to recommendations that we've put out for several years now. We put out a brief in 2014, and four years, as you know, is not that long for policy to change. A lot of those recommendations are still, I think, very relevant. I just want to highlight two that I think are most pertinent at your level.
The first is not a complicated recommendation; it is not based on extensive science. In order to better understand what's going on and to inform people of potential impacts to their health, we need to have access to data. At the present time, we don't have access to information about where planes are in the air, how many there are, and what types they are. We don't have access to the noise measurements. Access to data is recommendation one.