Photo credit: Tina Nord from Pexels
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring helped jumpstart the environmental movement in the U.S. and worldwide. Carson wrote lyrically, almost poetically, about how pesticides, especially DDT, damaged birds and caused birth defects and cancer.
If Carson were alive today, she might write about another environmental pollutant, noise.
I wrote about this, not as lyrically as Carson, in an editorial in the January 2022 issue of The Hearing Journal, the leading publication for hearing healthcare professionals.
This year the silent spring won’t be because the birds aren’t singing, but because too many people have noise-induced hearing loss, especially high-frequency hearing loss, and won’t be able to hear them sing.
And that’s too bad, because noise-induced hearing loss is entirely preventable: Avoid loud noise. And if you can’t avoid it, use hearing protection.
