>"Under WHO and National Institute of Health standards, more than 85% of plaintiffs have normal hearing."

If a device degrades your hearing from supernormal to just normal, or from high-normal to low-normal, is that not still damage?

IANAL , but unless you have a reference point to start with , I don't think you could prove damages.

normal is a normal range, unless you can prove your "new" normal is sufficiently worse than what you started with

It sounds like nearly 25% of people have a reference point to start with to prove that their new normal is sufficiently worse than what they started with:

"Nearly a quarter of the plaintiffs ... reported their condition in hearing tests before they ever used the Combat Arms earplugs."

That would seem to mean they have a "before" measurement, and can now test to get an "after" measurement.

I read that as the "condition" was hearing loss, implying it wasn't caused by the CA plugs.

When I enlisted into the US Army in 2006, a hearing test was done for all of us as part of the initial entry stuff. Then we had hearing tests every so often since, maybe every year or two. In my case, and I suspect for most, any hearing loss while in service is likely to be documented. I did not have any, and I also didn't use the specific earplugs the lawsuits are about.

Although that does require the hearing tests to be done correctly. It was hard to tell sometimes if I heard the tone or imagined it.

Even with all that, almost everyone loses hearing as they age, so you'd really have to shnow not just loss, but loss beyond what'd be expected from a population being nearly 30 years older.

1. There are hearing disorders related to noise exposure that may come without detectable hearing loss, like hyperacusis and tinnitus. See "Hidden Hearing Loss".

2. Most hearing tests only go up to 8 kHz.

Were it not for the faulty design, they would not have been exposed to dangerous levels of noise.

But to your credit, there are plenty of arguments that could explain hearing loss at any degree, including voluntary consumption of ototoxic chemicals like alcohol and ibuprofen.

Full of it, or had hearing issues like everyone does in the service, and then goes to a live fire exercise every few weeks or combat with 3M plugs and the issue goes from bad to deaf?

Eh, SCOTUS happily sided with corporate profits over the lives of soldiers in Boyle v. United Technologies Corporation.