Hearing Condition Plagues U.S. Veterans

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Hearing Condition Plagues U.S. Veterans

Title: Hearing Condition Plagues U.S. Veterans
Description: Gigi Douban reports on All Things Considered that tinnitus is the most common service-related disability among veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Author: Gigi Douban, National Public Radio
Length: 05:34
Size: 2.54 MB

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Sound isn't merely part of the atmosphere of war, it's also a danger in itself. Tinnitus or tinnitus is the number one service-related disability among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Gigi Douban reports.

(Soundbite of clapping)

GIGI DOUBAN: So many things can set off the ringing in Janet Parker's ears: a car door slamming, dishes clanking, her two PeekaPoo puppies barking.

(Soundbite of dog barking)

DOUBAN: Once the ringing starts, she can't turn it off, can't drown it out.

Mr. JANET PARKER(Veteran, Desert Storm): I just couldn't understand what the ringing, you know, that noise was. Just wanted to make it stop because it was driving me insane.

DOUBAN: Exactly what she was hearing is a little hard to explain.

Ms. PARKER: The only way to describe it is how the sound of a cricket is when it rubs its legs together. Just picture that at a thousand times -that one cricket - and that's a thousand in each ear. So you've got the noise coming into both ears, this high-pitched tone.

DOUBAN: Parker is a Desert Storm veteran who was diagnosed with tinnitus or what others call tinnitus. She's one of at least 639,000 veterans dealing with this disorder, which is a 60 percent increase from four years ago.

Costs have been rising too. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs doesn't track compensation for tinnitus specifically. But the American Tinnitus Association estimates this disability costs the government about a billion dollars annually, more than double the cost in 2005.

Colonel Vickie Tuten is an audiology consultant to the Surgeon General. She says the prevalence of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan are to blame.

Colonel VICKIE TUTEN (Audiology Consultant, Surgeon General): I think this particular conflict, because the use of improvised explosive devices has been the weapon of choice by the enemy, we've seen significantly more types of blast injuries.

DOUBAN: Tinnitus is a symptom of that. There's no cure for it. And what has baffled audiologists is that tinnitus can be debilitating for some and little more than a nuisance for others.

Ms. FLORENCE CUNEO (Audiologist, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Birmingham, Alabama): And because of that night and day and then the whole gamut between, that's where audiologists have struggled with, you know, how do we treat this?

DOUBAN: Florence Cuneo is an audiologist with the VA in Birmingham, Alabama. The answer for years, Cuneo says, has been to stick a device in the patient's ears. These range from hearing aids to small MP3-like gadgets that pipe ocean waves or white noise into the ears.

The catch is that many of these have to be worn several hours a day for months at a time. And that's a hard sell for younger vets, like 28-year-old Michael Davis.

(Soundbite of baby and ceiling fans)

DOUBAN: In Davis' house in Jacksonville, Alabama, you hear ceiling fans, box fans, all of them whirring pretty much all the time.

Mr. MICHAEL DAVIS (Veteran, Iraq War): When I would sleep, I would constantly have to sleep with a - some type of noise, a box fan or anything like that, to kind of cushion the noise and to block it out so I could sleep.

DOUBAN: Davis is an Iraq War veteran and it was his job to guard ammunition points for the Iraqi army.

Mr. DAVIS: And we would stack 40,000 pounds of the Iraqi's explosives and detonate it every day.

DOUBAN: That was six years ago, and his ears are still ringing.

The VA is swamped with patients and has begun to add audiology staff and extend clinic hours around the country.

Ms. CUNEO: I was going to ask you, too, were you able to review some of that tinnitus workbook that I gave you?

Mr. DAVIS: I looked at it. I didn't go through it thoroughly.

Ms. CUNEO: Okay. Yeah. That's fine. It is a step-by-step guide that you would just want to do a little bit, you know, each day.

DOUBAN: Several of the nation's VAs have started using a program called Progressive Tinnitus Management. Florence Cuneo says it takes a tiered approach to treatment, starting with counseling, to say: Here's what's going on. You're not imagining this.

Ms. CUNEO: Then they actually cope. You don't see them again.

DOUBAN: It's cheaper, officials say, than treating every tinnitus case with a device, which can cost more than $2,000. But what about prevention? Michael Davis had your standard Army-issued earplugs. But he says they just weren't practical.

Mr. DAVIS: When we were out in rural areas driving, you know, in convoys and stuff, it would - you couldn't, you know, it was hard first to wear them because you couldn't hear what was going on.

DOUBAN: The Defense Department thinks it may have an answer for that. It will soon outfit service members with a dual function earplug. It's a hearing protector that also lets you hear what's happening around you.

Still, ear protection can only do so much, and the VA just hopes to help veterans cope.

For NPR news, I'm Gigi Douban in Birmingham, Alabama.