Africa Health Knowledge Management Portal
Informing Health Decisions and Actions
Prevention of deafness and hearing loss
Community Engagement
Disability and Rehabilitation
Description
Globally, 360 million people (about 5% of the world��s population) live with disabling hearing loss, of whom 32 million are children. The prevalence of hearing loss increases from 1.7% among children to 7% in adults (including 183 million males and 145 million females).1 Nearly 180 million people aged 65 years or older (that is, more than 30% of the population in this age group) have hearing loss that interferes with understanding normal conversational speech.2 High-quality, national and local epidemiological data on hearing loss, however, are generally lacking and this scarcity contributes to low awareness of the problem.3