Potential health risks of exposure to noise from personal music ...

Health risks from exposure to noise from personal music playersNumber (thousands)500004000030000200001000002004 2005 2006 2007Year10 European countries EU estimateFigure 4: The number of unit sales (in thousands) for all portable audio devices forthe ten countries and for the EU, adjusted according to the internet users in each countryas estimated by EuroStat.The overall number of audio devices sold in the ten countries and in the EU as a whole isshown in Fig 4. This shows the overall increase in sales in 2005 that has been maintainedin the following two years, with more than 50 million devices being sold per year by2007. Figure 5 shows that the PMP player sales were responsible for that increase. Thepercentage of MP3 players sold as proportion of all portable audio devices has increaseddramatically from over 20% to over 80% in the last three years (from 2004 to 2007),and in 2007 it consisted of over 30 million unit sales in ten European countries 18 (vs of 10million for CD players at its peak in 2004) (fig. 5).units35000300002500020000150001000050000CDMP32001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007yearFigure 5: Number of unit sales (thousands) in ten European countries for CD andMP3 devices between 2001 and 2007.18Austria, Belgium, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland46