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As printed in Hearing Health, volume 20:2,
Summer 2004
By Nick Laperle
The World Council on Hearing Health (WCHH) takes the
45-year tradition
of the esteemed Deafness Research Foundation (DRF) and
extends its reach into the international community.
It is a natural outgrowth of all that has gone before
in DRF’s history but perhaps most directly of
the National Campaign for Health (NCHH).
The purpose of NCHH, a five-year initiative launched
in 1999, was to put hearing health on America’s
agenda and its record indicates success. The campaign
attracted attention from mainstream media (US News and
World Reports, The Jim Leherer News Hour, USA Today,
to name a few), founded the Congressional Hearing Health
Caucus in 2000 and most impressively, played an influential
role in increasing newborn hearing screening from 29
percent in 1998 to 90 percent today.
These successes offer incentive and encouragement
to rise to the challenge of putting hearing health on
the world’s agenda. The time to begin is now.
Hearing loss is a silent epidemic with serious and
widespread societal impact. There are currently 33 million
Americans and 2.9 million Canadians with deafness or
hearing loss. That is 10 percent of the population and
this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of global
numbers.
The MRC Institute of Hearing Research estimates that
in 10 years, over 700 million people worldwide will
experience some form of hearing loss. Primary contributors
to this probability are lack of funding for hearing
research, neglect of proper hearing protection around
toxic noise in the workplace and at home and insufficient
knowledge about the simplicity of leading a hearing
healthy lifestyle.
In response to this potential human catastrophe, we
have formed the World Council on Hearing Health. We
will join with the existing international hearing groups,
each with its individual focus, to build a global coalition
of experts and socially conscious corporations to work
in unison with governmental entities to promote hearing
health. This coalition will promote platforms of detection,
prevention, treatment and research in order to achieve
the following objectives.
- To increase by a factor of 10 the funding for hearing
research by the year 2015
- To standardize newborn hearing screening and intervention
programs in at least 25 countries around the globe
by 2015
- To establish a universal standard of hearing protection
in the workplace by 2015
• And to establish, endorse and promote a single
Gold Standard of Hearing Health across the world
In the coming years, the council’s founding member
organizations will formulate a strategic plan to unveil
in 2007 at the first World Summit on Hearing Health.
Standing in solidarity will be non-profit organizations,
corporations and governmental entities from around the
world. All will be committed to a detailed and powerful
approach to putting an end to hearing loss through WCHH’s
four central platforms.
These are aggressive goals and objectives. They are
going to be challenging but as former U.S. Surgeon General
C. Everett Koop says, “It is not only good medicine
but it demonstrates fiscal responsibility to detect
and treat hearing loss early on.” This is practical
advice.
As demonstrated by DRF’s national initiative,
when we talk about hearing health to the general public,
people get it … it just makes sense. Now it’s
a matter of making this message stick for the long haul,
far and wide. The WCHH will ensure that it does, thanks
to its strength in numbers, the expertise of its member
leadership and a firm belief that good hearing health
should be an individual, national and global way of
life.
Nick Laperle is WCHH’s chairman,
a member of DRF’s board of directors and president
and chief operations officer of Sonomax Hearing Healthcare,
Inc. He lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
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International Hearing
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