B-E-W-A-R-E! That earpiece could send you to early deafness

Emeka Ibemere
Onyenakeya Emilia, 26 and a Senior Secondary School Student of a popular school on Abaranje Road Ikotun LCDA, in Alimosho Local Government Area of Lagos State may have died as a result of injury she sustained from accident on her way back to school that fateful day of August 13 2013, but her schoolmates are yet to learn anything from her ugly experience.
Emilia was brutally knocked down when a popular Lagos commercial bus known as Danfo hit her from behind as the bus rammed into her after several horning and shouts from onlookers calling on her to give way but to no avail. She was brought down and hit her forehead on the road by the bus. She died.
She was unable to hear the driver’s horn and the shouts of the passers-by because of the earphone she used in stuffing her ears. Emilia was not the first person to be killed in this circumstance.
Aside that, it could lead to accidental death on the user. Death associated with earphone wearing by youths and some seniors are rapidly on the increase in the urban areas and rural. The popularity of iPods, Black Berry and other high-tech phones have brought new attention to the issue of hearing loss and the estimate that 65 million Nigerian youths will be having hearing impaired by 2030 may finally get people to listen.
It was gathered that youths and other People who wear headphones might want to ditch them while walking outside. Investigations revealed that accidents involving pedestrians wearing the devices have tripled in recent years. Though there are no reports or data from National Road Safety Commission on earphone related accidents in Nigeria but there are tendencies that some accidents resulting from earphone wearing has caused a lot of deaths.


When in a bus, inside cars, churches, classrooms, walking on the road, offices and libraries and even when being talked to, people wad their ears with earphone gadgets just to hear music.
The most disheartening aspect of it all is the fact that parents do not ask their teenagers to remove their headphones so they can speak to them. Today, three in 10 youths wear earphones while speaking to their parents, a situation which is becoming worrisome to even the users.
Fumi Thompson, a student said she is addicted to wearing earphone even when she is sleeping. She said it will be difficult to end the use of earpiece and that it doesn’t cause any harm to her.
 But experts said listening through headphones at a high volume for extended periods of time can result in lifelong hearing loss for children and teens.
According to them, a mild hearing loss could as well occur due to excessive noise that could lead to developmental delays in speech and language.
Researchers of different hue are of the opinion that it causes hearing loss.
 According to Dr Clem Ugochukwu, a tiny iPod seems much less threatening than a rock concert but it actually may be more dangerous.
He revealed that by 2030, most Nigerian youths wearing ear phones are likely going to suffer hearing loss.
According to one audiologist who spoke to our correspondent says that the iPhone and iPods are the most hazardous earbud-bearing products out there. He also suggested that teenagers who are wearing earphones run the danger of suffering early signs of noise-induced hearing loss.
A teacher, Mrs Olegeme is worried by the way young ones go about padding their ears with earpiece even when they are talking to you or discussing something important.
She disclosed that they would make you to strain your voice shouting before they could be able to hear what one was saying. The teacher decried the attitude of Nigerians in abusing anything they get to know about.
A sociologist Christiana Duru added that western life is killing our youths. She frowned at the attitude where people tend to live a force life just to get unnecessary attention or to say they belong.  She also believes that wearing earphone could cause deafness.
Usoro John said that it has become a culture kind of thing among the youths who go about wearing the earpiece or earphones without knowing its health implications. He said Nigerian youths abuse everything in their bid to announce their arrival in their social circles but pay little attention to the disadvantages of such abuse.
“Do you know that most of them where it when they are in class in front of their teachers? Tell me how they will hear what the teacher is teaching”? He asked rhetorically.
In America, Research has found that college students who listen to their iPods in a noisy environment tend to play them at 80 percent of the possible volume, putting their hearing at risk after a little more than an hour. Other studies have found that young people have a rate of impaired hearing 2 ½ times that of their parents and grandparents.
Dr. Kourosh Parham, an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialist at the Health Center, says it doesn’t matter whether it’s an iPod, MP3 player, or an old-fashioned Walkman, hearing loss simply depends on how loud the sound is and how long you’re exposed to it. The louder the sound, the less time it takes to damage your ears.
In a study published in an online on Monday in the journal Injury Prevention says Researchers combed several sources to find incidents in the U.S. of crashes involving pedestrians and vehicles from 2004 to 2011. Searching the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Google News archives and Westlaw Campus Research, they found 116 cases of death or injury involving pedestrians wearing headphones. Cases in which people were using mobile phones (including hands-free devices) were excluded.
Over the years the number of cases increased, from 16 in 2004 and 2005 to 47 in 2010 and 2011. The victims’ average age was 21 and most (68 percent) were male. The majority (67percent) were under the age of 30. Most (55 percent) were hit by trains, and 70 percent of the crashes, most of which were in urban areas, were fatal.
In 74 percent of the cases, police or eyewitness reports said the pedestrian had headphones on when hit. And 29 percent of reports made mention or horns or sirens going off before the crash. The study authors pointed to two likely culprits that may be a factor in what they call “the possible association between headphone use and pedestrian injury”: sensory deprivation and distraction, the latter more specifically called “inattention blindness,” referring to the use of electronic gadgets and how they decrease attention to things going on around us.
The report says hearing what’s going on in the environment, could be more important than visual cues for pedestrians. But the authors add that this study doesn’t show causation or correlation of headphone use and pedestrian risk, and other factors could have been involved in the accidents, such as pedestrians being intoxicated or drivers being at fault.
More comprehensive information on such accidents are needed, the researchers said, to see which groups of people may be most at risk. Another study suggests that headphone-related pedestrian injuries and even deaths are on the rise. There are cases of being distracted while driving and using a cell phone behind the wheel while wearing earphones and even with a hands-free headset.

The report added that Pedestrians who wear headphones while walking are at greater risk of serious injury or even death than people who don’t tune out, according to a new study published last week in the journal Injury Prevention. Between 2004 and 2011, the study found, 116 pedestrians wearing headphones died or were injured in the U.S. in accidents involving cars or trains they didn’t hear or see coming. Overall, the number of injuries related to headphone use tripled between 2004-05 and 2010-11. The report says.

The authors acknowledge that the increased fatality rate may be exaggerated, however, since their data came from sources including the national Electronic Injury Surveillance System, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Google news archives and the Westlaw Campus Research database, all of which may be biased toward noting deadly accidents involving headphones but underreporting non-fatal ones. It’s also not clear whether headphones directly caused pedestrians’ injuries, or whether driver fault, alcohol, mental illness or suicidal intent could have contributed to the crashes. Still, the data should be enough to prompt anyone who likes to listen and walk to think twice before tuning out.

Researchers say that using headphones distracts users from the task at hand, whether that means concentrating on the road and navigating traffic as a driver, or keeping an eye — and ear  out for hazards like trains and cars while walking.

Headphones also serve to isolate users from their environment, cocooning them so that they’re less aware of what’s going on around them. In the study, researchers found that in 29% of cases, victims who were hit by cars or trains apparently failed to hear the warning sounds of horns and sirens.

“The actual sensory deprivation that results from using headphones with electronic devices may be a unique problem in pedestrian incidents, where auditory cues can be more important than visual ones,” lead author Richard Lichenstein of the University of Maryland wrote in the paper.

Experts have warned that using headphones at a sufficiently high volume level may cause temporary or permanent hearing impairment or deafness. According to them, the headphone volume often has to compete with the background noise, especially in loud places such as subway stations, aircraft, motor parks, bus stops and large crowds. They argued that extended periods of exposure to high sound pressure levels created by headphones at high volume settings may be damaging; however, one hearing expert found that "fewer than 5% of users select volume levels and listen frequently enough to risk hearing loss. It was reported that some manufacturers of portable music devices have attempted to introduce safety circuitry that limited output volume or warned the user when dangerous volume was being used, but the concept has been rejected by most of the buying public, which favours the personal choice of high volume.
According to the specialists, listening to music through headphones while exercising can be dangerous. Blood may be diverted from the ears to the limbs leaving the inner ear more vulnerable to damage from loud sound. A Finnish study^] recommended that exercisers should set their headphone volumes to half of their normal loudness and only use them for half an hour.
Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers that are designed to be held in place close to a user's ears. Headphones either have wires for connection to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio, CD player, portable media player, mobile phone or have a wireless receiver, which is used to pick up signal without using a cable. They are sometimes known as ear speakers. The alternate in-ear versions are known as earphones or ear buds. In the context of telecommunication, a headset is a combination of headphone and microphone.
Headphones originated from the earpiece, and were the only way to listen to electrical audio signals before amplifiers were developed. The first truly successful set was said to have been developed in 1910 by Nathaniel Baldwin who made them by hand in his kitchen and sold them to the United States Navy.