Saving babies from ‘invisible’ disability

Did you know you can speak because you are born with the ability to hear? Many babies are not.

But how do you know which baby can hear and which baby cannot? Hearing impairment is not something that can be visibly detected like other birth deformities.

Most of the time, even parents fail to notice this, running back to doctors for help, much later, only when their kid is old enough to talk. By then, a child’s inability to hear would have already started affecting his/her foundations of vocabulary and language.

But what if the situation can be avoided easily with a machine?

“Nobody can tell whether a child is able to hear properly or not in the first few days of life,” said Dr Anuj Grover, consultant, neonatologist and director, Setu Newborn Care Centre, Ahmedabad.

“But with the help of Echo-Screen we can tell fairly accurately if the child is able to hear properly or not,” said Dr Grover.

The UN health agency estimates that up to five in every 1,000 infants have severe to profound hearing impairment. In India, over 27,000 children are born deaf every year.

Echo-Screen is a device that analyses a baby’s hearing ability by sending sound signals of different frequencies to the eardrum, through earphones. The eardrum’s response is then picked up and evaluated by the machine for any hearing defects. The technology is called otoacoustic emission.

“If the machine says ‘pass’ after analysis, then it means the child is able to hear properly, but if the machine says ‘refer’ we have to redo the test in a couple of weeks. The results are very reliable,” said Dr Grover who does up to five tests everyday using Echo-Screen at his hospital.

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