Noise at school: health complaints and discomfort in public school teachers

This study investigated health complaints and noise annoyance in teachers from two public schools, with and without voice disorders. 53 teachers were evaluated (27 from School 1 and 26 from School 2). The following procedures were conducted including two questionnaires with information about health condition and noise exposure. The statistical analysis was conducted by Mann-Whitney Test and Spearman Correlation. The prevalence of voice disorders was 44, 4% in School 1 and 50% in School 2. There was a high prevalence of headache and stress in both schools. There were no statistical differences between symptoms and voice disorders. All teachers from both schools reported the presence of noise in the workplace. The condition "always noisy" was related for 83, 3% and 66, 7% teachers with and without voice disorders from School 1. From School 2 was related 69, 2% and 84, 6%, respectively. The majors' noise sources were students, internal classroom noise and external noise. There were effective relation between voice disorder and external noise annoyance. Information collected from the two schools was different. However, noise annoyance was very high in both schools, independently of the presence of voice disorders.