Hearing Health Facts and Hearing News
Since World Hearing Day (as declared by the World Health Organization) was on March 3rd, this is a “Hearing News” segment with information about maintaining healthy hearing “across the lifespan,” making listening safe and how to successfully use hearing protection.
HLAA teamed up with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) to produce literature on how to maintain hearing “across the lifespan.” HLAA and ASHA say that early intervention and timely treatment are important because hearing loss can affect every area of a person’s life throughout their lifespan. They list physical health, mental health, career success, social life and personal life as the key areas of a person’s life that can be affected by hearing loss.
In 2015, WHO launched an initiative called “Make Listening Safe” with the objective that people of all ages “enjoy listening with the full protection of their hearing.” The trend towards people using smart devices at increasing frequency (and levels) led to this initiative. As a part of this initiative, WHO along with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), created a standard on safe listening devices. An important fact uncovered during this initiative was that “more than 1 billion young people (ages 13-35) are at risk for hearing loss due to recreational exposure to loud sound.” More information can be found on the WHO website here.
Now that we’re talking about making listening safe it only makes sense to talk about properly inserting earplugs. Here’s a helpful gif made by Noisy Planet (an initiative by NIDCD) that illustrates how to safely and effectively put in earplugs.
This has been “Hearing News” from your friends at HLAA-TC. As always, if you have anything you want to see in an upcoming post, please comment on this blog or connect with us on Facebook.