Many studies have confirmed that the impact of hearing loss on children’s school performance is widely underestimated. Nevertheless, one in four students are concerned and hearing problems are the one of the most frequent causes of having to repeat a year in school. In the United States, nearly 50% of 15-year old students who have had to repeat a grade suffered from some type of hearing loss. If auditory deficiency, which concerns 2 out of 1,000 newborns, is the most common sensory disturbance, the lifestyle of adolescent and young adults explains also why they are more affected by it. “Almost every adolescent has an MP3 player and the people who are going to concerts are younger and younger in age. Today, people consume music literally nonstop and at levels that often exceed 100 decibels,” confirms the Professor Zorowka of the Department of the Hearing, Speech and Language Disorders at the University Clinic of Innsbruck (Austria). For him, the real concern lies in the detection of the hearing loss that “develops progressively and is rarely identified by children, their parents or their teachers when it takes hold. In most of cases, the lack of concentration and motivation in class is wrongly interpreted as a behavioral or an academic problem.”  In order to remedy this public health concern, Hear the World proposes in its web site, http://www.hear-he-world.com,a free hearing test that one can easily take independently. “Our objective is to attract the attention of children, parents and teachers on hearing loss and on the importance of early prevention,” explains Vanessa Erhard Blattmann, Director of the Hear the World campaign with Phonak. Source: Hear the World. (Picture: Starkey)