Safe lifetime occupational exposure-1 LONE (lifetime occupational noise exposure).

For many years, it has been recognized by those working in the field of industrial noise that understanding how much noise is needed to cause hearing loss over a lifetime is difficult to communicate to most people, even those who have an understanding of logarithms. The concept of expressing noise exposure in industrial situations without decibels is the focus of this paper. Eldred (“Sound Exposure without Decibels” Internoise-86) discussed this approach for community noise. ANSI Standard S3.44-1996 defines sound exposure with units of Pascals squared seconds, or PASQUES, as noted by Eldred. This paper proposes that a safe value for lifetime occupational exposure to noise be expressed in terms of PASQUES. The authors will discuss the pros and cons of such an approach and offer 11.5 × 106 million PASQUES as the upper limit for a safe lifetime exposure to occupational noise.