Hearing loss in Australian divers.

Permanent hearing loss of the sensorineural type has been demonstrated to be an occupational hazard of professional SCUBA divers. An audiometric survey was performed on a group of professional abalone divers, all of whom had experienced excessive exposure to dysbaric conditions. The results of this survey revealed that, even allowing for the very liberal requirements of the Australian Standard for divers, over 60% had unacceptable sensorineural, high frequency deafness. In half these cases deafness was unilateral, and in half bilateral. Making allowance for age, two-thirds had hearing loss to a degree which is compensable, according to the method of the National Acoustic Laboratories (1974) for determining proportional loss of hearing.