Photo credit: Jonas Mohamadi from Pexels
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
This interview of U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams and FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb discusses an unprecedented epidemic of vaping among teens. According to the FDA Commissioner and the Surgeon General, the epidemic caught public health authorities by surprise.
Use of personal music players, with associated headphones or earbuds, is also very common among teens. About 90% of teens have a personal music player of one sort or another. An article last year reported found auditory damage among 14% of Dutch schoolchildren age 9-11 who used personal music players. One might call this an epidemic of personal music player use.
It takes about 40 years of noise exposure for noise-induced hearing loss to become clinically apparent, so when today’s young people are in their 40s to 50s, they will likely be as hard of hearing as today’s people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Since 2015, I have been trying to get those federal agencies responsible for protecting the public–the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Advertising Practices, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission–to take action to protect young people’s hearing. I’ve also communicated with the American Academy of Pediatrics, which educates parents about the dangers of sun exposure and tobacco smoke, but not about noise.
I’m going to add the Surgeon General to my list. A predecessor issued a Call to Action about skin cancer, but no one has said anything about noise in more than 50 years.
So far my appeals have largely been ignored.
So the question is this: Will there be an unprecedented epidemic of hearing loss in children and teens when they get older? And will those charged with protecting Americans’ health remember that they were warned?
