ABSTRACT
The economic basis of our society-the way the people make their livelihoods-has undergone fundamental changes during the last half of the twentieth century. The important changes include dependency on communication skills and increase of environmental noise exposure. In the past, we depended largely on manual labour. Today we depend upon communication skills-hearing, speech, and language. This, in turn, has a profound effect on definition of illness and society’s expectation and demands placed on the medical profession. About 13% of European citizens have a communication disorder that almost exclusively depends on being hard of hearing. In 1853, Robert Koch stated “now when we have won the battle over tuberculosis, we have to conquer the next great problem-noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).” This statement is still valid, and the riddle of NIHL has not been solved.
