SYDNEY: Generation after generation, teenagers have been told by their forebears to turn down that music. Now there seems to be a good medical reason to do so.
The World Health Organization warned in a recent report that over a billion young people are at risk for permanent hearing loss. One of the main culprits is a widely used device for listening to music — the smartphone.
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“Anything where you’re putting sound into the eardrum, that’s something as a society that we need to take a closer look at,” says Rex Banks, chief audiologist at the Canadian Hearing Society.
That’s because loud noises damage the cilia of the inner ear, the tiny hair-like structures that change sound waves into electrical signals that are carried to the brain. The damaged cilia never grow back. “Once they’ve been damaged, that’s irreversible,” says Banks.
Dr. Shelly Chadha, prevention of deafness and hearing loss technical officer for the World Health Organization, explains the danger with smartphones is that many people are listening to music that is simply too loud.
Compounding the problem, says Banks, is the fact that people often listen to music when they are out on the street or in the subway where there is a lot of other background noise.
