To Hear for Life, Listen with Care!!

To Hear for Life, Listen with Care!!

Every year 3rd March is observed as World Hearing Day an initiative by the World Health Organization. The World Hearing Day theme for the year 2022 is ‘To hear for life, listen with care.’ The focus for this year is safe listening practices which are essential across the life span in order to take care of our hearing.

There are 1.1 billion young adults and teenagers who are at risk of developing hearing loss due to the unsafe use of personal audio devices and exposure to damaging levels of sound in noisy entertainment venues. The World Health Organization in its 2021 report highlighted the number of people living with hearing or are at risk of hearing loss. The report further highlighted exposure to loud noise as one of the major causes of hearing loss. The report has emphasized that hearing loss can be prevented by evidence-based and cost-effective public health measures.

In order to prevent hearing loss, we should follow some safe listening practices which are as follows:
• Avoid keeping the volume levels more than 60% for personal listening devices
• Avoid places where there is a loud noise or use earplugs, earmuffs and move away from
a sound source such as loudspeakers
• Avoid continuous exposure to noise, take short breaks from loud sounds.
• Limit the duration of daily uses of personal listening devices
• Monitor the duration of listening levels through apps

For more suggestions on safe listening, practices consult an Audiologist.

Contact:
Dept. of Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology, Kasturba Hospital, Attavar, Mangalore
Manipal Academy of Higher Education
Email: audiology.kmchat@manipal.edu
Phone number: 0824-2445858

Submitted by: Dr Rohit Ravi