Hearing Well: Sound Warriors
To understand how Sound Warriors came into being, you first need to know about Hearing Ambassadors and our founding Trustee.
Andrew Campbell lost about 75% of his hearing about 9 years ago. He already had some industrial deafness, but a dramatic change in his hearing was brought about by a viral infection. This pesky virus changed his way of communicating with the people around him overnight and forever. After about 3 years of seeking a cure for his hearing loss and drifting into an extreme state of loss, anxiety and loneliness, he turned his disability into a force for good. Hearing Ambassadors mission is to celebrate our sense of hearing, to become aware of our own hearing health and also the hearing needs of those around us. Most people think that hearing loss mainly affects old people. This is where Sound Warriors comes in.
It is rare for teenagers and young people to associate noise induced hearing loss with their recreational activities, but the truth is that those who are most at risk of noise induced hearing loss are today's 12-35 year olds. The Paul Checkley of the Musicians Services put it this way
"Noise Induced Hearing Loss is 100% irreversible and 100% preventable" The World Health Organisation have their own
Make Listening Safe campaign and Dr Bente Mikkelsen (WHO Director for the Department for Noncommunicable Diseases) describes in
WHO March 2022 Newsletter how
"Millions of teenagers and young people are at risk of hearing loss due to the unsafe use of personal audio devices and exposure to damaging sound levels at venues such as nightclubs, bars, concerts and sporting events"
The sad thing is that there is very little public information or campaigns about how to prevent hearing loss. Our Derbyshire based organisation,
Hearing Ambassadors, believe that it is never too early or too late to start to look after your hearing health, so, we have created a unique and exciting new project for 8-14 year olds which we have called
Sound Warriors. We want to help young people to celebrate their sense of hearing in a really positive way, so the theme for our work is
"Loving our Ears" We have a website and we are just launching our schools initiative.
Here is an example of a video that we have created that explains how hearing works, and what happens when we hear very loud sounds.
https://youtu.be/QitAe10iE8k. It will be going onto the website soon.
Please pass this information on to anyone who might be interested. We should be so pleased to hear from them and explain more about our preventative work.
Best Wishes,
Gill Campbell
Andrew and Gillian Campbell
Hearing Ambassadors
(Inspired and run by members of Rotary District 1220)
Registered Charity Number 1187089
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click here to:-
Posted: November 2022