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Hearing loss among teens is already more than 50%, due to loud music.
Where did you get that figure? Everything I've read has said only 1 in 5 teens are suffering from hearing loss (which is high as it is) but no where near 50%.
"Hearing loss" is like the word "big" or "old" or "smart". How do you define those who fit the description?
For many years, the University of Kansas routinely tested the hearing of all incoming freshmen. There was a sudden jump in the 1970's in the number of kids who met whatever their criteria was for "measurable hearing loss", going from, as I recall, less than 20% in the mid-century, to around 70% in the era after headphones and loud amplifiers became commonplace. This was reported in the media in the '70s, but I've been unable to recover the data online. But the relevant thing is that the same metric criteria were used throughout. That was a point at which exposure to smokers was beginning to diminish.
Loud music was not the only factor. The mechanized family farm has become an extremely noisy place, and children growing up on farms are exposed to very high levels of sound from farm machinery.
The human ear evolved to function within a range of decibels likely to be encountered in the environment. Humans in pre-industrialized societies, even to this day, go their entire lives without ever exposing their ears to sounds louder than birds singing. They have been found to have the ability to hear sounds less than a quarter of the decibel levels of Europeans. By that criteria, simply living in a modern American house results in measurable hearing loss to every child by the age of two or three, simply from the ambient gray noise of the city that hammers away constantly on the ears.
One could say that 1% or 99% of people in a certain group suffer from "hearing loss", depending on where you draw the line defining hearing loss.
The determining factor was serum cotinine level. No let me think... where have I ever been where there was secondhand smoke...??? OH! Yeah! Bars and restaurants where there was loud music! Gee, so if I was exposed to secondhand smoke in a restaurant that wasn't very clean, I'll bet I could get funding for a study that says "SECOND HAND SMOKE CAUSES FOOD POISONING!!!"
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