• Question: How does someone lose their hearing?

    Asked by anon-202379 to Hanna on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Hanna Jeffery

      Hanna Jeffery answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      So many different ways…

      Around one in a thousand people are born with hearing loss.
      Another one in a thousand loses their hearing because of illness as a child (things like meningitis).
      I have met people who have lost their hearing because of an infection which got inside their ear, people who have lost their hearing while having an ear operation and people who have lost their hearing because of medicine which can poison the ear (but the medicine saved their life). People who were in the second world war sometimes tell me about being in an explosion which damaged their hearing.

      The commonest reasons for hearing loss are old age and working in noise. Your ear contains ‘hair cells’ (much smaller than the hairs on your head) and you need them in order to hear. When these get damaged by very loud noise, or stop working properly when you are getting old, your body cannot make new ones.

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