A WORLD of utter silence awaits one child among a thousand born—and two more loses the gift of hearing in early childhood.
Fact
hits like crack of thunder: ear infections acquired at birth up to 11
years of age can also touch off deafness in nearly 100 percent of all
children. At
least 10-15 of every 100 school children fail the hearing screening
test. Too, studies found that two of every five grade one pupils suffer
from impaired hearing.
Such
impairment arise from two conditions and both can be treated,
avers Dr. Teresa Luisa L. Gloria-Cruz, one of three tenured research
faculty of the Philippine National Ear Institute in her updates
delivered before a January 16, 2014 forum on “Hearing Screening in
Filipino School Children: The Accuracy of the Hearing Screener Device”
held at the University of the Philippines in Manila.
The two conditions that trigger hearing impairment in
Filipino school children: impacted cerumen and otitis media.
Cerumen
or earwax, which an attentive mother tenderly eases out of her baby’s
ears with soft cotton buds to cap every bath episode, such wax which
turns up in the ear to block dirt and infective agents can also become
tightly packed in the outer ear canal to the point that the canal is
blocked.
Otitis
media is, on the other hand, inflammation of the middle ear resulting
from infection—this can be painful and often causes temporary loss of
hearing.
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| My handwriting. I had to write the article by hand after our desktop conked out. |
Downright loss or less than severe impairment affects a child’s capacity to learn.
“Third
grade students even with minimal, not moderate, not severe, not
profound, but just minimal or mild hearing loss had lower scores in
reading vocabulary, reading total, language mechanic, basic battery,
word
analysis, and science.
“So
because of all these concerns, for the sake of our students, because of
the concern of possible hearing loss that is undetected in school
children, the Philippine National Ear Institute took upon itself an
advocacy in screening for such hearing loss,” she points out.
After
the Institute was established in 2004, members of its faculty zeroed in
on two key areas of research they needed to tackle for the next 10
years: (1) newborn hearing screening, and (2) hearing screening in grade
1 pupils.
Institute Director Dr. Generosos T. Abes explains their decade-long pursuit:
“(1) there was high prevalence of hearing loss among this population;
(2) most of the causes of hearing loss in this population are preventable and treatable;
(3)
there is high impact on omission of learning and speech development
among patients affected by hearing loss in this (age) group; and,
(4) more than anything else, we thought that there were no existing programs for hearing screening for these two population
groups.”
The
Institute’s research efforts paid off in the enactment of a 2009 law
which mandates “every newborn must undergo hearing screening before the
age of three months.”
Hearing
screening for school children, however, faced a stumbling block: “There
is no official and standardized national hearing screening for school
children in the Philippines, unlike in developed countries where pure
tone audiometry and tympanometry are the most common standards in use.”
Such
lack of standards stems from “paucity of epidemiologic data of hearing
disorder in school children to be used as basis, a lack of cohesive
guidelines in reporting of results locally and internationally, a lack
of collaboration with agencies and institutions for a unified effort to
formulate such a program,” Dr. Gloria-Cruz cites.
Beginning
2004, PNEI faculty hopped through the country’s major islands and took
to training, teaching, and research missions—school nurses were trained
in ear examinations using a penlight to detect earwax and discharge,
“and they were able to produce significant sound pressure level
with the use of the PNEI Tuning Fork Test.”
Indeed,
dire necessity can be the mother of inventions—PNEI turned up a
battery-operated instrument, a “handheld gearing screener to check the
hearing ability of a patient simply, quickly and easily so that its
correct usage may be learned and done by nurses and teachers in the
school.”
Thus
far, the accuracy of the PNEI hearing screening device is 95.9
percent—and there was 73-percent coverage of the entire population under
study, she reports.
“Screening
is a component
of preventive medicine—primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary
preventive measures are used to prevent the onset of a specific disease;
secondary measures are used to detect disease, and tertiary measures
are used to manage an existing disease with the goal to restore a
patient to highest function, minimize the negative consequence and
prevent disease-related complications,” Dr. Gloria-Cruz relates.
The
tasks at hand remain a work in progress but PNEI strives onward, for
the sake of Filipino children, because “undetected hearing loss in
children can lead to speech and language delay, social and emotional
problems, and academic difficulties”—veritable whispers than can be lost
in the storms of din these days.
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