With all this evidence that hearing impairment affects a child’s development and performance, I believe strongly in screening children for hearing as early as possible.
In fact, I am very much in favor of screening newborns for hearing problems, which is not a universal practice. A growing number of proffesionals, including neonatologist, believe it imperative to screen infants as early as possible, ideally at birth and certainly by the age of 1 to 2 months at the latest. Each day, some thirty-three infants in the United States are born with total hearing loss, the most common congenital disorder in newborns, and twenty times more prevalent than phenylketonuria, a condition for which all newborn are currently screened. An estimated sixty additional infants per day are born with moderate hearing loss that could be exposed with universal newborn screening and intervention programs. Furthermore, statistics show that 90 percent of hearing-impaired infants have known risk factors. That infants at highest risk for hearing loss, not surprisingly, are those in the neonatal intensive care unit where the risk of moderate-to-severe permanent hearing loss in both ears is ten to twenty times higher than in the general population.
As advocates of early hearing detection and intervention programs (EHDI) can tell you, universal newborn hearing screening can identify those infants who have even moderate hearing loss, enabling them to receive speech and language therapy, amplification, and family support immediately, before their development falls far behind that the other children of their age. This kind of universal screening even has the potential to reduce the disparity in language skills between deaf and hearing children.
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