Liability claims storm building over British industry about noise-induced hearing loss
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Photo Credit: Kateryna Babaieva
British industry is facing increases in liability claims following a precedent-setting workers’ comp case that awarded a worker £713,000 or $950,800 for occupational noise-induced hearing loss, according to a story in the Edinburgh Reporter.
(As readers of this blog site may know, I generally avoid discussing occupational noise issues. Workers have legal protections, including noise exposure limits, a regulatory structure, and the workers’ compensation system to protect or compensate them for workplace auditory damage. The general public has none of these protections. I am covering this report, though, because of the implications of the ruling for noise exposure by the public.)
What made the 2023 Barry v Ministry of Defence case striking was not only the large payment, but the fact that the court accepted evidence of synaptic damage that is not detected by standard hearing testing, called pure tone audiometry. The court calculated future earnings losses and general damages on a broader basis than previous noise cases.
The cochlear synaptic damage is called Hidden Hearing Loss, so-called exactly because standard auditory testing is normal but the patient complains about difficulty understanding one conversation among many in a noisy environment. Two good articles about this are What’s Hidden in Hidden Hearing Loss https://www.entandaudiologynews.com/features/audiology-features/post/what-s-hidden-in-hidden-hearing-loss and On the Etiology of Listening in Noise Despite Clinically Normal Audiograms. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28002080/
The article quoted a UK industrial noise reduction specialist who says, "What we are seeing is a generation of workers diagnosed with hearing damage that was not picked up at the time. Auditory damage was a lagging indicator…Newer testing methods are now picking up earlier-stage damage, and that is now feeding into a wave of claims for exposures that happened twenty and thirty years ago.”
And that’s true for the public, too. Standard hearing testing is an insensitive measure of auditory damage. By the time hearing loss is detected, hearing has really been damaged for years. Preventing noise-induced hearing loss and two other noise-induced disorders, tinnitus and hyperacusis, is simple and inexpensive: If something sounds loud, it’s too loud. Turn down the volume, leave the noisy environment, or use hearing protection, and one’s ears should last a lifetime.
I will be speaking about the latter topic on June 15 at the 15th Congress of the International Commission on Biological Effects of Noise in Copenhagen, presenting the evidence that what is called presbycusis or Age-Related Hearing Loss is really largely preventable noise-induced hearing loss in older people, the cumulative effect of a lifetime of excessive noise exposure. I’ll share my analysis with the readers after the meeting.
