Copyright 2000 Times Publishing Company
St.
Petersburg Times
September 28, 2000, Thursday, 0 South
Pinellas Edition
SECTION: CITY & STATE; Pg. 1B
DISTRIBUTION: CITY & STATE; METRO & STATE;
TAMPA & STATE
LENGTH: 911 words
HEADLINE: Tones for testing tiny young ears
BYLINE: WES ALLISON
DATELINE:
TAMPA
BODY:
A mandatory screening for
newborns will help doctors and parents determine definitively whether infants
can hear.
Connor Tate and his brother, Scott Jr., are off to a good
start. They are healthy and especially robust for twins. Their mom, Carmen, is
doing well and their dad, Scott Sr., is learning to change their diapers.
And because of a new test that every Florida infant soon should have,
the twins likely will win little credence with the excuse, "Sorry, Mom, we
didn't hear you."
Beginning Sunday, a new state law will require
hospitals and birthing centers to test the hearing of all newborns before they
go home. It's designed to catch hearing impairments early, before children fall
behind in language, communication and other crucial markers of early childhood
development.
"I wouldn't have (known to check it), unless later down the
road I started worrying something was wrong," said Carmen Tate of Treasure
Island.
"It's an excellent idea," added her husband. "Anything that
allows us to know our children are healthy and developing well."
St.
Joseph's Women's Hospital in Tampa, which delivered 620 babies in August alone,
has offered the screening to every infant since April, to give its staff time to
work out any bugs. Tampa General Hospital also has been offering it.
Dr.
Richard Sheridan, a neonatologist and medical director of St. Joseph's
infant hearing screening program, said the early detection
allows a child with a problem to be fitted with a hearing aid, evaluated for
surgery or enrolled in therapy.
"If a child doesn't hear well, he's lost
in his own world," Sheridan said. "If you can bring that child back into
the world with everybody else, they grow up much better."
Florida is one
of 32 states that now require this screening. Private insurance and Medicaid,
the state insurance system for poor children, must cover the cost of about
$ 80 per child.
Between one and three of every 1,000 children are born
with some degree of deafness, but most aren't diagnosed until age 2 1/2 or 3.
That's largely because most parents don't realize something's amiss
until they notice their toddler isn't as communicative as others. Babies also
develop at widely different rates, so there's usually little concern if a child
seems a bit behind his peers until then.
"Even if the parents bring it
up to the pediatrician, the pediatrician's response is just wait, the child will
outgrow it," said Charlie Diggs, state advocacy director for the American
Speech-Language Hearing Association, which has lobbied for more screening.
"A child can't tell you that he can't hear. And typically, the child may
respond to very loud noises, so the parents may say, "Jeez, he can hear it when
I drop a plate behind him or slam a door, so the child can
hear,' " Diggs said. "But that hearing for loud noises is not the same
type of hearing you need to understand the nuances of speech."
Until
recently, however, it has been difficult to determine how well small children
actually can hear. Except for a small number of arduous, expensive tests,
screening a child's hearing has consisted mainly of making a noise and watching
for reaction.
"Clap your hands, and if the baby looks up startled, you
figure that baby can hear," Sheridan explained. "But you didn't know if the
baby heard it, or partially heard it, or was responding to the vibration, or was
responding visually to you."
But new technology makes it possible to
measure the physiological response of the inner ear to sound, rather than the
response of the baby to sound.
The test is easy, virtually painless and
takes a couple minutes. It is about 98 percent accurate.
On
Monday, technician Art Martinez wheeled Connor Tate into an examining room, held
his left ear and inserted a small red probe equipped with a tiny speaker and a
tiny microphone.
He turned on the machine. The baby barely stirred as a
series of tones, inaudible to the adults in the room, stimulated the tiny hairs
of the inner ear. The hairs created their own sounds, called otoacoustic
emissions, which told the machine that Connor's ear heard the tones, loud and
clear.
Martinez rolled him over and checked the other ear. The machine
indicated the ear heard nothing. But the ear canals of newborns often are full
of wax and fluid or can be oddly shaped, which can skew the test, so babies
often are retested later, after the ear dries out, or the parents are asked to
return in two weeks.
Children whose ears are not working properly are
referred for further testing.
Martinez tugged gently on Connor's ear
lobe to open the ear canal and hit the tones again. The big green
"pass" light glowed on the computer screen, indicating that ear was fine,
too.
"If he's nice and quiet, it goes by really quick," Martinez
said before wheeling Connor, still sleeping soundly, back to his parents. "Some
babies are awake, and they respond to the tones. Sometimes they smile, sometimes
they grimace."
Florida was one of eight states to add the testing
requirement this year.
"Study after study shows that if you identify it
early and get early intervention within the first three to six months, by the
time the child enters kindergarten most are performing at the level of their
peers," Diggs said.
"It's really a no-brainer. And the advantage is
that money you would have spent in special education can go to other kinds of
resources. It really is an ultimate money savings to the state."
GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO, CHRIS SCHNEIDER;
Five-month-old Nicholas Polley has his hearing tested while being fed by mom
Janet Polley at St. Joseph's Women's Hospital in Tampa.
LOAD-DATE: September 28, 2000
