Hearing News Watch

HOUSTON–Continental Airlines has become the first airline to provide passengers with closed captioning for live television broadcasting on some of its aircraft. The closed captioning will help passengers with hearing loss enjoy in-flight entertainment, including over 100 channels of DIRECTV-provided satellite television. This enhancement will be offered initially on all LTV3-equipped Boeing 737NG planes operated by Continental. The closed captioning

PORTLAND, OR—It has recently been established that hearing loss commonly accompanies diabetes. In fact, those with the disease are twice as likely to have a hearing impairment as are non-diabetics. However, information about the strong link between diabetes and hearing loss is not yet widely known to the public. That’s why when the American Diabetes Association holds an Expo on February

MINNETONKA, MN–Jerry L. Yanz, PhD, an audiologist who has held prominent positions with hearing aid manufacturers, has been appointed vice-president of hearing health at hi HealthInnovations™, a UnitedHealth Group  company. Yanz, who most recently was director of audiology at Hansaton-US, will lead a team of hearing health professionals in implementing the introduction of hi HealthInnovations’ new line of hearing products that

TEL AVIV—Common sense has long told us that playing an iPod or other MP3 player too loud or too long is a likely cause of the rising rate of hearing loss in young people today. But a recent study by researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel uncovered hard evidence that teenagers’ music-listening habits may trigger an epidemic of hearing

PHILADELPHIA–One of the latest entries in the fast-growing field of direct-to-consumer hearing aid sales is Embrace Hearing. Founded by two former classmates at Stanford University, Sam Tanzer and Ross Porter, the Philadelphia-based retailer claims to offer “high-quality hearing aids” for $299 and up. According to Embrace, its digital, custom-programmed hearing aids are manufactured in the U.S. using components from Siemens

ITHACA, NY/DAVIS, CA—Funded by federal grants, universities in New York and California are launching innovative programs to better serve the needs of people in their area with hearing loss. Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, is partnering with Rochester [NY] Institute of Technology (RIT) and Camden County College in New Jersey, to provide online support for deaf and hard-of-hearing students majoring

BUSHRIDGE, MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA–Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways, teamed up with the Starkey Hearing Foundation recently to provide 490 hearing-impaired children and adults with hearing aids. The one-day mission took place at Branson’s Bhubezi Health Clinic in Bushridge, South Africa. Bhubezi Clinic is a one-stop center established by Branson’s Virgin United to provide basic healthcare, TB, and HIV/AIDS

BABOL, IRAN–An Iranian scientist has built a tiny capacitor microphone too small to be seen by the naked eye, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency. The microphone, developed by Bahram Azizollah Ganji, a faculty member at Noshirvani University in the northern Iranian city of Babol, could be used in building small and invisible hearing aids. The device, which is

BOSTON–It’s no secret that listening too long and too loud to heavy metal bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath will do bad things to your ears. However, a recent paper has implicated another sort of heavy metal in hearing loss among U.S. adolescents. Writing in Archives of Otolaryngolology–Head & Neck Surgery, Josef Shargorodsky, MD, MPH, a researcher

MELBOURNE—Cochlear, the dominant company in the cochlear implant industry, announced this week that it has discovered what was causing about 2% of its Nucleus C1500 units products to fail. Those failures led the Australian-based company to voluntarily recall the whole Nuclear line in September. Cochlear notified clinics that handle its devices that a fault in the manufacturing process had caused