Earphones Could Kill You! Here’s How…
On the long trip to your destination, on that late night bus ride home, at that boring lecture when you’re at the back of the class and when you’re taking an evening walk around the corner, your best friend would more often than not be your headphones or your earphones.
We all love listening to music, podcasts or our favourite broadcasts when we’re off the clock, but scientists have discovered that this could be a potential injury or death sentence for the unsuspecting listener.
“Everybody is aware of the risk of cell phones and texting in automobiles, but I see more and more teens distracted with the latest devices and headphones in their ears,” Dr. Richard Lichenstein, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement to Live Science. “Unfortunately as we make more and more enticing devices, the risk of injury from distraction and blocking out other sounds increases.”
The professor, together with a team of colleagues had been conducting a series of studies on past reports and databases published between 2004 and 2011 of pedestrian injuries or fatalities on the road, with specificity to those that included the use of headphones. It’s amazing then that a whopping 70 percent of those accident cases were fatal.
Does it need much convincing then to make us realize that using headphones (or texting at that) could make you lose your life? Just last year a Kenyan minister lost his son to a terrible accident on a European street, where he was listening (rather loudly) to music on his headphones that he could not hear a descending plane, which subsequently swept him away as the aircraft made a crash landing.
Using earphones has a distractive quality in that the listener’s senses are ‘deprived’ as you become less aware of your environment. It’s therefore important that you try to stay as alert as possible and aware of your surroundings especially as you walk.
After all, who would want to lose their life over using earphones?
