World Savvy
Voice loss and population & Progress
Global, National, and local Impact
There are 10 million people all over the world with speech impairment. Around 5% of children have speech disorders that are noticeable around the time they're 6 and 7 years old.
There are 6-8 million people in America who suffer from some sort of speech impairment.
As these diseases have not received the attention they should have, it's very difficult to determine the local population that has voice impairment.
By the year 2100, the world population will grow by 53% from 7.3 billion to 11.2 billion, and the number of people with a rare disease will grow from 10 million to 15.3 million. The number of people in the United States with a rare disease will also increase from 6-8 million to 9-13 million.
A couple Viewpoints
There are some perspectives on the issue of voice loss and how it relates to population and progress.
• The population will increase as time goes on. Therefore, these physical and genetic diseases will become more common unless we take the time and donate funds to research and solve them.
• Another viewpoint could be that because small diseases don't affect that many people, they're not as imminent to solve. So, people generally focus their energy on larger more life-threatening diseases such as cancer.
• A different viewpoint is that the technology is too expensive to support these people.
• Another viewpoint is that we need more money to make advancements in the technology, to help these people with rare diseases. Every dollar can make a difference in helping these people.
• Scientists need to focus more on the bigger diseases that affect more people instead of focussing on rare diseases that noly affect a couple of people.
• Drug companies patents are expiring making a new opening for rare diseases
There is a large debate about how the world should go about solving these issues. There is no solution that is perfect, but it is our job to research and voice all perspectives on the issue. These views also include how we should go about solving them as a global community.
The progress to solving these diseases is very complicated and depends on a lot of resources. We have narrowed it down to two possible solutions. There is a lot that can be done but one of the main issues is resources.
Genetic Research & Text-To-Speach:
• Technology is very useful to solving the genetic diseases especially. Unfortunately, time and technology takes a lot of money to fund. Not many scientists want to work on the less important diseases so there hasn't been much progress in that area.
• There have been huge advances in Text-to-Speech Technology which are helping people with speech disorders find their voice and their individuality. Going beyond Siri, Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home. Rupal Patel has founded a company where people can receive their unique voice by donation. She has been a trailblazer in coming up with a solution for people who have lost their voice.