Soledad came to Child Aid’s CORAL project in Oaxaca, Mexico at age 8, unable to speak a single word. Her parents suspected there was something wrong with their child’s hearing, but were unable to pay for expensive diagnostic tests. So they did what many poor Oaxacan families without access to proper medical care, they just made do.
On her first appointment at the CORAL clinic, Soledad was diagnosed with severe hearing loss and fitted with her first pair of hearing aids. Then, in order to help Soledad make sense of the new world around her and to begin the long, slow process of learning a language, she was promptly enrolled in CORAL’s school, specializing in auditory-oral education for deaf children.
Have you ever tried learning a new language? Do you remember how the unfamiliar sounds and phrasings twisted your tongue and rendered your lips useless? Perhaps you remember the feeling of absolute frustration in not being able to adequately communicate your ideas. Maybe you thought, “This would be so much easier if I began learning [French, Spanish, German] at a younger age.” If this experience is a familiar one, then you understand the difficulties deaf children face when learning to speak.
After four years of intensive language therapy at the CORAL school, Soledad is now able to express basic ideas through speech. Last year, she was enrolled in school for the first time and now attends third grade. An extremely bright girl, Soledad’s case is an exercise in “what if?” What if she got the treatment she needed when she was a young child? What if she began language therapy when she was still a toddler — at a time when much of our language skills develop?
Early detection of her hearing loss is what Soledad needed. Once a child is diagnosed with a hearing disorder, time is of the essence. From birth to 3 years of age, an infant acquires language skills at an exponential rate. This is the critical period in which to begin specialized language therapy if a child suffers from hearing loss. Helped by amplification technology (i.e., hearing aids), deaf children “immersed” in sound at a very young age develop the ability to recognize and process sound meaningfully, which forms the foundation of speech.
To address the issue of late detection and to prevent more situations like Soledad’s, CORAL is preparing to launch the first early hearing loss detection program in the state of Oaxaca. Thanks to a recent donation of a state-of-the-art hearing testing machine, CORAL is now equipped with a very sophisticated and comprehensive audiology clinic. With this new machine, CORAL’s audiologist is able to conduct detailed and sensitive hearing tests on infants and very young children — a service previously offered only in Mexico City and in expensive private clinics in Oaxaca.
The underlying goal for CORAL in this initiative, is to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to providing rehabilitative care to children with hearing loss. Recent studies show significant gains in verbal development in hearing–disabled children if hearing loss is detected and intervention begins before 6 months, as compared to those children who are diagnosed and treated later.
The impetus for developing this early detection campaign came directly from the CORAL staff, who saw first-hand the tremendous struggle older deaf children faced when trying to learn to speak and write without any prior oral-auditory therapy.
In partnership with the Mexican Department of Health Services, CORAL will offer educational materials in all 165 public health clinics and six hospitals in the Central Oaxaca Valley to new parents. These informational brochures, given with the state’s infant health packet, will detail how to test for potential hearing loss of an infant at home, what behaviors to look for that might indicate hearing loss, and where to go for services if parents suspect their child may have a problem.
On the hospital side, CORAL will provide training to doctors in public hospitals and clinics on how to do a basic screening for deafness using behavior testing as well as update them on recent advances in audiology.
Once trained, if a doctor finds evidence of a hearing problem, she or he will send the patient information to CORAL’s outreach program and the CORAL staff will then follow-up with the parents, directing them through the process of getting their child tested and treated.
Throughout, the parents will receive information and support from CORAL’s social work team on the realities of having a deaf child as well as the parents’ options to rehabilitate and educate their child in order to give him or her the best advantage possible.
Through the early dection program, CORAL will test and identify many of low-income babies and young children as deaf or hard-of-hearing at time in their development when they are most responsive and adaptive to language therapy. (In Mexico currently, the average age of detection of hearing loss is 4 to 5 years). When the program launches in early 2004, the CORAL staff members estimate that they will educate approximately 200,000 people about hearing loss in its first year alone.
CORAL can’t turn back the clock on Soledad and children like her, but it can help other children with hearing disabilities receive ongoing treatment and therapy at a very early age. Thanks to CORAL’s early detection program, low-income Oaxacan parents will no longer be plagued with “what if?” questions when thinking about the future of their deaf child.
