Photo credit: Stefan Schmitz licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
and their personal audio devices may be at least partially to blame. Melanie Campbell, a professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta, warns that young adults “may be destined to swap out their headphones for hearing aids.” The problem is that this cohort “particularly loves music, they love it loud and they have very few worries about the future.” Campbell notes that World Health Organization statistics show that “[m]ore than one billion young adults are at risk of hearing loss,” and “[a]mong people aged 12-35 years, almost half are exposed to dangerously high levels of noise from personal audio devices like headphones while four out of 10 are exposed to unsafe levels of sound at concerts and other entertainment venues.”
According to Campbell, the primary cause for this hearing loss these days is noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). What makes hearing loss particularly insidious, is that people generally don’t lose their hearing overnight. Instead, says Campbell, “[i]t creeps up and you gradually forget that you’re not hearing the door squeak, or you don’t hear people’s heels on the floor.”
To give young Canadians the information they need to protect their hearing and prevent hearing loss, Campbell has been promoting Sound Sense, a project led by the Hearing Foundation of Canada that spreads awareness about hearing loss in Canadian schools.
Spreading awareness about NIHL and how to prevent it is, of course, the the best option. Every school in the U.S. should regularly test students’ hearing and include information about NIHL in their health education programs. Given that NIHL is 100% preventable, the failure to educate children about how they can avoid NIHL is as insidious as the disorder.
