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When Mark and Angie King's
daughter Erica was born, she seemed perfectly healthy. She was alert. She
babbled. She smiled when she saw them. There were no signs to warn them that
something might be wrong, the Celina, Ohio, parents recall. But six months
later, Mark King began to suspect Erica couldn't hear. He
noticed he had to tap her before she'd turn to face him. Angie King refused to believe there might be a problem. "Sometimes when we walked into the room, she'd look. Sometimes she wouldn't," Angie King says. "I dismissed it." When Erica was 9 months old, Angie King grew alarmed when her babbling and cooing dropped off. So the Kings took her to an audiologist, who diagnosed that she was deaf. Of the 4 million babies born in the United States each year, about 12,000 are born deaf, according to the Deafness Research Foundation in Washington D.C. But the condition is no longer the soundless sentence it used to be. "If we could catch every baby who is deaf at birth, we can enable almost every one of them to hear" to some extent, says Jack Wheeler, the deafness foundation's president and CEO. "If you don't have your baby tested at birth, you are not going to know your baby is deaf until it's almost too late."
If deafness is diagnosed early
enough, experts say, most children who are born that way can have at least some
hearing restored through technological improvements like high‑powered
digital hearing aids and cochlear implants, which are mechanical devices that
produce digitally coded electrical signals transmitted directly to the auditory
system. But time is critical. Deaf infants' brains begin to adapt almost
immediately to the lack of auditory input, according to Dr. Calvin Sia, a
physician at the Hawaii State School for the Deaf and Blind and a member of the
American Academy of Pediatrics' Task Force on Newborn and Infant Hearing.
Permanent damage by age 3
By age 3, permanent damage
occurs. The longer a child goes without hearing, the more difficult it will be
to ever learn language in the same way hearing children learn, Sia says. And
many children's hearing loss is being discovered dangerously late, when they
are, on average, 22 years old, Wheeler adds. There are two commonly used methods
for testing infants. The first is an auditory brain‑stem response, in
which sensors are placed on the head and neck to detect levels of brain
activity in response to sound. The second, an otoacoustic emissions test, uses
a soft rubber probe placed within the ear canal to measure the ear's response
to stimulus. Each test costs between $35 and $50. Yet only about 35 percent of infants are tested in American
hospitals, Wheeler says.
"There is a clock that's
ticking in the baby's brain," he adds. "New parents must insist on
having your baby's hearing tested in the birthing hospital. Don't take 'no' for
an answer." However, not all
doctors believe that testing every child is necessary, or even practical. Part of the problem is money, according to
Dr. Paul Kileny, director of the audiology and electrophysiology department at
the University of Michigan Health System. Kileny says states with mandated
hearing tests failed to make sure that doctors and hospitals would get paid for
the testing. Kileny himself favors
testing only those infants who have at least one risk factor: low birth weight,
a family history of childhood deafness; are infected with a virus such as
herpes; need an antibiotic, respirator or heart‑lung
machine after birth; or have abnormalities of the head, face or
neck.
About 4 percent to 6 percent of
infants with those risk factors will have a hearing loss, compared to only 0.5
percent of infants without any risk factors, Kileny says Second, he says, some children born with the
ability to hear lose their hearing when they are several months old, so the
money would be better spent teaching pediatricians to spot signs of hearing
loss.
But to the parents of deaf children,
testing every child seems absolutely worthwhile. Once she was diagnosed, Erica King, who is now 4, used hearing
aids before recently receiving a cochlear implant And when the Kings' second
daughter was born, they refused to leave the
hospital
before she was tested. Jaime, now 2 years old, was also born deaf.
She is now using hearing aids.
"There was nothing that would alert us there was something wrong,"
Angie King says. "It is very deceptive. You can't tell by clapping your
hands or banging pots and pans. All children need to be tested." Approximately 30 states now have laws
requiring that infants get tested for hearing loss before they leave the hospital. But the success of such programs varies
widely, according to the deafness foundation, because not all the states have
earmarked the necessary funds for the programs and the tests. In a recently
issued report card on each state's success rate in instituting universal
screening, the foundation found: Those
states that scored "excellent" (almost all babies are screened and a
statewide system of coordination, training, quality assurance and follow‑up
has been established) included: Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa,
Mississippi, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wyoming. Marked unsatisfactory were places in which fewer than 15 percent
of babies are screened and there is no governmental effort or coordination.
They included: Alaska, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont,
Washington state and Puerto Rico. For More Information,
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