The effects of urban traffic noise on children at kindergarten and primary school: A case study in Enna

Generally, the noise concept can be defined as an element of disturbance in daily human actions. The perception of noise and its disturbance depends on many factors such as the age and gender of the exposed persons but also on environmental and cultural factors. Noise pollution is defined as the introduction of noise into the living environment or in the external environment such as to cause annoyance or disturbance to resting and human activities, danger to human health, deterioration of ecosystems, gods material goods, monuments, the living environment or the external environment o such as to interfere with the legitimate use of the environments themselves. unlike other environmental pollutants that are still present, noise pollution it is perceived as a sensory stimulus and immediately interferes with individual and collective activities, well before reaching the levels to which you are they verify biological damages. it has been observed, both in laboratory and field studies, that levels of noise produced by traffic with the value of LAMAX (noise levels using the A-weighting) above 40 dBA cause psychophysiological reactions during sleep, in terms of effects on cardiac rhythm and respiration. For such reactions, hardly an addiction occurs during the night and between the different one’s nights. Children show a greater psychophysiological reactivity than the adults. in schools, noise disrupts communication, reading, learning, remembering, and solving complex tasks in classes. in kindergartens, noise can be disturbing while playing, singing, or sleeping. in this article we illustrate how important it is to integrate environmental and health issues in order to convey a key message considering different required data to be officially reported to the European Commission. our results show that children in primary schools and kindergartens in Enna, in the middle of Sicily, Italy, are potentially exposed to excess levels of road traffic noise. these results will also be valuable for spatial planning in the Municipality of Enna, Sicily.