Scientists Warn of Ipod's Shock Value

Beware: listen to an iPod outdoors during a thunderstorm, and the last thing you hear could be great balls of fire.

A number of cases in the US suggest that using the popular music player during a thunderstorm increases the severity of injuries suffered by anyone struck by lightning.

While lightning usually flashes over a victim's skin, the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the headphones of an iPod can act as a conductor, directing a bolt of electricity straight inside the listener's ear - rupturing eardrums and leaving severe burns.

Doctors in Vancouver said a 37-year-old man was treated after lightning struck a nearby tree while he was jogging past, listening to religious music. He was thrown 2m from the tree, but it was the iPod's headphones that appeared to do the most damage.

"Although the use of a device such as an iPod may not increase the chances of being struck by lightning, in this case, the combination of sweat and metal earphones directed the current to, and through, the patient's head," the doctors wrote.

The electric shock from the lightning strike left second-degree burns on his chest, neck and ears, while the surge through the headphone earbuds ruptured his eardrums and harmed his hearing. His jawbone was broken, the doctors concluded, as a result of clenching his jaw muscles.

"It's the first time we've had a recorded case of such an incident involving a person wearing headphones and we think the public should be warned," said Eric Heffernan, one of the three Vancouver doctors who wrote up the case for the journal.

Despite treatment the man still has less than 50% of hearing and wears hearing aids on each ear. The iPod was destroyed.

"The particular injuries were made possible, if you will, because of the iPod. Without the iPod, the spectrum of injuries would have been different but there would have been injuries nonetheless," Ernest Nitka, a neurologist at the lightning data center at the St Anthony Hospitals in Colorado, told the Calgary Sun newspaper.

The Vancouver jogger is not the first to get a shocking tune over his headphones. Jason Bunch, an 18-year-old in Colorado, was mowing the lawn and listening to Metallica on his iPod when he was knocked unconscious by lightning last year.

The strike left Mr Bunch with burns where his headphone cables touched his face, another burn on his hip where his iPod sat in his pocket, and required two rounds of surgery to repair his ruptured eardrums.