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Ministry of Health tolerates noise pollution

by Eric Jackson

One recent morning, a little after 2:30, the burglar alarm next door at Texanesa went off. The horn for that device is located about 15 feet from where I was sleeping, and the noise went on for at least 15 minutes and was well in excess of 100 decibels. My ears rang for the next couple of days.

When the cop came to find no break-in, I urged him to write a noise violation ticket. He said that it's not his job. At 6:30 a.m., the guy from Texanesa came to work and set off the alarm again. I shouted. He laughed.

So a few hours after that, I called the Ministry of Health's Office of Environmental Health (Sub-Direccion de Salud Ambiental). The spokeswoman for the ministry --- and don't give me any objections about who's authorized to say what, Dr. Alleyne, because the people who answer your ministry's phones DO speak for you and your ministry --- told me that noise is not an environmental health issue.

Does this match or surpass Mireya's creepiest anti-health move? Probably not. The ministry's patently obnoxious and unscientific support for deafening noises in the middle of the night may be an absolute disgrace, but it probably won't rack up a death toll anywhere near what is bound to result from the Moscoso regime sending Phillip Morris propagandists into the public schools to tell the kids that smoking's a grown-up thing to do.

Hearing loss, lost sleep and the increased stress are some of the more obvious and better documented medical consequences of noise pollution. Reduced labor productivity and increased antisocial behavior are common sequelae. The Ministry of Health's claim that noise is not an environmental health problem flies in the face of the great preponderance of medical opinion.

(But then, successive Panamanian governments have shown just how much they care for scholarly articles by the way that they have over several years let the Gorgas medical library that the Americans turned over to Panama rot away in boxes in a hanger at Albrook.)

So is the situation an unmitigated cause for despair?

Actually, it isn't. Panama City's municipal government is considering local legislation to combat the loud noises and disgusting smells that cause so many constituents to complain to their representantes. (If he was home that night, my representante would have heard the racket --- he lives just across the street.)

The main problem with municipal legislation is that cities don't have much power in this country, and because the noise pollution is so pervasive in the capital there are things that ought to be done that the mayor and city council can't legally do.

Can the city government regulate the settings on alarm systems, particularly those near places where people live? Perhaps. Can it ban the importation or sale of certain types of alarms, or forbid insurance companies to give lower rates if people install public nuisances? Probably not. Can its inspectors issue more noise tickets for violations of existing laws? Most likely they can. Does it have the resources for more than a token effort against all the noise? That would be very unlikely.

What's needed is a systematic crackdown on those whose business is the creation of noise --- people like those who import and sell the California troglodyte congressman Darryl Issa's Viper car alarms, or who run nightclubs that regularly blast out the neighbors, or who install infernal machines like the one that woke me up. What's needed is a cultural change, wherein people insist that their cars be far more effectively protected, with silent hidden kill switches and advanced lo-jack electronic tracking devices that lead police quietly, inexorably and directly to stolen vehicles. And yes, what's needed is a Ministry of Health that gets over its unhealthy state of denial.