Protecting Your Hearing

Noise is unwanted sound, which can have various undesirable effects on those exposed to it. It can affect you psychologically by startling you, annoying you, and disrupting your concentration. It can interfere with your communications when you are talking to someoneand as a result interfere with your job performance and your safety. It can affect you physiologically by causing a loss of hearing, pain, and even nausea when the exposure is severe. The amount of noise generated by a particular activitymachinery clanking, jackhammers pounding, a boom box running at full volumeis measured in decibels. !"#$%s hearing conservation standard provides for monitoring the decibel levels of noisy operations. &hen these exceed a specified level, a number of protections kick in. 'irst efforts are made to reduce the noise itself, and when those controls are not sufficient to reduce the noise to a safe level, ear protectors of various kinds are to be provided and worn. These may be either earmuffs or earplugs of various designs. &e provide a choice of hearing protection devices. It sometimes seems that there%s more resistance to wearing hearing protection than any other type of personal protective e(uipment. !ne of the most common reasons given is that the workers don%t think they really need it. )ut hearing loss is so gradual, even in intense exposures, that by the time you reali*e that you can%t hear as well as you used to, the damage has been done and can%t be reversed. #ere are some clues that point to a need for hearing protection+ ,. #aving to speak in a very loud voice or shout directly into the ear of a person in order to be understood. -. #ead noises and ringing in your ears at the end of the workday. .. "peech or music sounding muffled to you after you leave work, but fairly clear in the morning when you return to work. $nother common reason workers give for not wearing hearing protection is that it is uncomfortable. /vidence of this attitude can be found in such practices as springing muffs so they don%t seal against the head, slipping off the inner end of plugs and leaving only the outer end tab to fool the supervisor, and indifferently molding and inserting malleable type plug materials. )ut because the devices work by reducing noise levels at the inner ear, good protection depends on a good seal between the surface of the skin and the surface of the ear protector. $ very small leak can destroy the effectiveness of the protection. This is why protectors must be resealed from time to time during the workday, since they have a tendency to work loose as a result of talking, chewing, and so forth. "ome initial discomfort is sometimes experienced in obtaining a good seal, but skin

irritations, injured eardrums, or other harmful reactions are exceedingly rare. There will be no adverse reactions as a result of using ear protectors if they are kept reasonably clean. Nor will the use of ear protection make it more difficult to understand speech or to hear warning signals when worn in a noisy environment. 0ost of the available hearing protectors, when correctly fitted, provide about the same amount of protection. The best ones for you, therefore, are the ones you can wear properly. Then what you hear today will not be gone tomorrow.