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UAE urged to screen infants for hearing defects

Speaking to Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the Arab Health Exhibition and Conference on February 2, Dr Rana A. Batterjee, an audiologist with the American Hospital, Dubai and member of the Middle East Academy of Otolaryngology said, ‘As an academy, we are trying to promote the message that the New Born Hearing Test should be made compulsory.’

She also said that hearing loss in infants was 20 times more common worldwide than the metabolic disorder for which PKU (a test to check metabolic disorders) is compulsorily carried out after birth in the UAE.

‘The World Health Organisation has already recommended adoption of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening (UNHS) as a policy while such programmes have already been launched in the United States and the United Kingdom with success. We wish to establish the same concept here,’ she added. ‘These tests should be made compulsory,’ said Dr Batterji.

According to the UNHS guidelines, every newborn should be screened, hearing loss should be identified within three months and intervention should be done within six months.

She pointed out that loss of hearing in a child commonly remains unreported until the age of two, particularly in the GCC region. ‘This is late as early intervention would mean early treatment,’ she said, adding that by the age of seven, the brain stops receiving sound signals from the ear which makes treatment impossible.

Quoting a study carried out by a Saudi doctor, Dr Siraj Zakzouk in 2002 among 10,000 children under 15, Dr Rana said that while in the US – using the UNHS test – the average age that a child received intervention was two years, in Saudi Arabia it was four years.

‘The statistics differ from country to country in the ME region. The UAE has no stats at all in this regard,’ she said, adding that the hearing loss in the region was mostly due to genetic causes.

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