Asia Pacific Environmental and Occupational Health Journal

Introduction: Nowadays, exposure to noise has become one of the major concerns in a workplace. A cross-sectional pilot study was conducted among port industry workers at Pulau Pinang, Malaysia.

Objective: The main objective of this study was to determine the association between noise exposures with blood pressure among exposed workers.

Methodology: An area noise monitoring was conducted at three different workstations namely Strategic Business Unit Marine (ferry basal) and Strategic Business Unit Container (rubber tyre gantry and prime mover). Eight hours personal noise exposure monitoring was conducted among respondents in those area. Blood pressure were taken before and after shift work for each respondent. A set of self-administered questionnaire was used to assess the social demographic information and their health complaints.

Result: A total number of 51 male workers involved as respondents in this study. The noise level at prime mover was between 74.5 dB to 88.9 dB which is above the action level of 85dB. The results also revealed that there was no significant difference in blood pressure reading before and after the work shift among workers. The majority of the workers (66.7%) was classified to having pre-hypertension. They was 15.7% of respondents classified as having stage 1 hypertension, 9.8% as having stage 2 hypertension and 7.8% was normal. There was no significant association between noise exposure and blood pressure. Results showed that stress was the commonest health affect claimed by the workers (76.47%) followed by communication disorder (68.63%), emotional disorder (64.71%) and exhaustion (62.75%).

Conclusion: In a conclusion, findings of this study showed that there was no association between noise exposure and blood pressure among the workers. There was only one area exceed the action noise level.

Key word: noise, blood pressure, systolic and diastolic blood pressure and port industry.