evidence: complete hearing-loss source inventory - #81

Mode And Scope

• Mode: enrichment
• Role: literature-scout
• Pack: public-health/hearing-loss-care-access-global
• Task: source-inventory
• Issue linked: no generated task issue existed when queried; the canonical scoped task in tasks.json is the work claim. Origin pack: [new-pack] hearing-loss-care-access-global — 430M affected, 80% in LMICs, top-5 GBD YLD cause with no sub-national coverage data #60.

What Changed

• Classified nine source families as usable, limited, or rejected with explicit geographic grain, measure definition, collection method, timing, and failure boundary.
• Added four evidence records covering GBD audiometric prevalence, the 2021 ear and hearing care workforce synthesis, WHO hearing-domain capacity indicators, and a reproducible negative result for hearing-aid-specific rATA met-need rows.
• Moved source-inventory from scoped to needs-review and regenerated tasks-available.json, agent-radar.json, and generated Wiki pages.

Evidence Added Or Changed

• gbd-hearing-loss-prevalence-2019: separates modeled audiometric need from sparse hearing-aid coverage inputs.
• who-ear-hearing-care-workforce-2021: identifies audiologist data for 102 countries while preserving mixed-source provenance limits.
• who-assistive-tech-hearing-capacity-2021: records categorical hearing-service and hearing-workforce indicators without converting them to density or access.
• who-rata-hearing-aid-coverage-gap-2021: records that the public met-need endpoint exposed only total-product categories on 2026-07-15; a hearing-aid filter returned zero rows.

Validation Method

• pnpm format:check
• pnpm validate
• pnpm reproducibility:check
• pnpm verify:sources after one unchanged rerun cleared three transient repository-wide timeouts: 354 sources verified, 11 existing allowlisted warnings
• pnpm build
• Pre-push lint and build hooks passed

Known Limitations

• The inventory does not produce a workforce-density baseline or a hearing-aid coverage estimate.
• GBD country values can be modeled rather than directly observed.
• The workforce study combines six provenance families and needs source recovery per country.
• WHO capacity indicators are official country responses and categorical, not independently verified counts.
• The rATA API result is time-bounded and does not prove that non-public product-level data do not exist.

Kill Condition

The inventory's central negative result is invalidated if a reviewer can retrieve stable, public, hearing-aid-specific met-need rows from the cited WHO endpoint for the same access date or identify a standardized public sub-national LMIC hearing-aid coverage dataset that satisfies the pack's grain, definition, method, and timing requirements.

Reviewer Needed

Domain reviewer with hearing epidemiology, audiology workforce, or assistive-technology measurement expertise.

Protocol Notes

• The issue-board generator only sees scoped tasks. No task issue existed before this run, and after the task moves to needs-review the generator can no longer produce its issue body. The board workflow needs a non-retroactive recovery path for canonical scoped tasks missed at creation time.
• The generated Wiki labels this pack needs triage when its only front-door task is needs-review. That status hides submitted work and should be fixed in the generator rather than patched by hand.

Daily Run Checklist

• Read AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, SAFETY.md, core schemas, routing indexes, role guide, and relevant pack
• Chose exactly one mode: enrichment
• Completed one scoped task in one role
• Preserved measure-family boundaries and explicit limitations
• pnpm validate passes
• pnpm reproducibility:check passes
• pnpm verify:sources passes
• pnpm build passes and generated files are committed
• Protocol friction reported without weakening a gate

One-line contribution: this run verifies which global hearing-loss sources measure need, workforce, categorical capacity, or product access, and proves that none currently supplies a standardized public sub-national LMIC hearing-aid coverage dataset.