http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11428833 Seems reasonable to me. Artillerymen & the Infantry wear hearing protection so the bandsman shoud be entilted to protect their hearing too. No doubt the "elf n Safety" gone mad strories will follow

Morning Ray, Believe it or not, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of drummers suffering from hearing loss.

MikeC#2, I too have slight NIHL, caused I believe from playing in a youth band for several years in a small practice room. It wasn't the live performances that caused the problem (relatively few) but the regular practice. Ray, there are some well known rock musicians who have hearing damage, Pete Townshend being perhaps the most well known. Look closely at many perfroming musicians and they can be seen to be wearing some form of hearing protection. Sounds like sound H&S practice to me!

I thought my response might provoke some interesting comments. I think we need to consider that there will always be cases where noise induced hearing loss has occurred due to various noisy environments. Are these the extreme or the tip of the iceberg? I too suffer from hearing loss, although my wife says it's selective hearing loss and attributable the male species. Seriously, I was a train driver for nearly 20 years and I believe the noise resulting from rails, tunnels, points and so on, has contributed to my ailment. That said, hearing loss is a natural phenomenon which occurs with age. My eye site has also deteriorated in the last ten years and now I have to wear reading glasses, with millions of others, but I cannot put this down to anything other than natural deterioration due to age. Sad but true. Golf swing still as good as ever... :)

Many performers wear hearing protection (David Gilmour, Muse etc.) -hardly newsworthy. And Pete Townsend probably wishes he had done.

I think if any solider is exposed to enemy fire for so long that they develop NIHL then their hearing is likely to be the least of their worries (assuming burst ear drums from a blast front doesn't count as NIHL)

It's not the enemy's fire that causes your hearing to be damaged (by the time you hear the noise, the bullet has - hopefully - gone past you) but the noise of your own weapon's ammunition initiation right next to your ear and the noise from your mates' weapons near to you. And that's without larger calibre weapons. All soldiers on operations are encouraged to wear ear defence (the Army now issue personalised in-ear moulded defenders, so not the big ear defenders most people assume) at all times when deployed and it is compulsory during training. The requirement for members of a band to wear them is because the noise - consider reverberation marching down a street on a parade - is beyond all the action levels defined in the Noise at Work regs and so the MOD has a duty, as the employer, to introduce control measures. On the plus side, the band don't play whilst under enemy fire :)