GOALS OF THE COUNCIL
Amongst 8.7 million people in the United Kingdom who have impaired hearing, it is estimated that 2 million have a disabling degree of hearing loss and that 500,000 are severely deaf. Over age 65 one person in five has difficulty with understanding speech in noisy surroundings. Three children in every 1,000 are born with some degree of deafness.
The World Health Organization estimates that over 120 million people in the world have 'a disabling degree of hearing impairment.' In the developing countries at least half of that impairment could be prevented or reversed.
Against that background, and in collaboration with organisations concerned nationally and internationally with hearing science and medicine, the Hearing Conservation Council has now been registered as a British charity (registered number 1076379). The Council has two immediate aims. It will support some promising but under-funded research by British scientists into the factors in the ageing process which limit the hearing of older people in this country. In the developing countries it will support action by British teams to control four conditions which cause most of the hearing loss which affects massive populations.
The Council, with its registered office at University College London, is constituted under a Board of Trustees representing some of the main national organisations concerned with hearing science and with international development. We wish, as soon as possible, to establish a modest administration and to support a selection of priority projects, in the conviction that the organisation has the potential to make a major contribution both nationally and internationally to the prevention of avoidable disability.
We recognise that many causes of hearing loss are not preventable, that deaf people can live active lives and that their special culture merits the full respect of society. Our emphasis is on conserving the hearing of millions of people for whom avoidable hearing loss, particularly in childhood or old age, is a frustrating incapacity.
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