How to generate awareness on deafness
Dahlia Sartika , Sydney
| Sat, 01/30/2010 12:53 PM | Opinion
I felt driven to write a little bit about the
awareness of deafness and hearing impairments upon reading the article
about Virginie Lassilier in The Jakarta Post's Jan. 6 edition. Lassilier
is helping the deaf with theater and raising awareness of the problems
associated with being deaf in Yogyakarta.
It is such a pleasure to know that someone, a
foreigner, cares so much about helping children and young adults that
suffer from hearing impairments in Indonesia. Helping the deaf with
theater is unique, reviving and extraordinary.
Deafness, unlike
blindness, is an unseen disability. The general public is, therefore,
largely ignorant of the hearing loss phenomenon.
Yet, deafness is the
most prevalent sensory disability globally. The problem is
disproportionately high in the Southeast Asia Region; every third deaf
person in the world is from Southeast Asia.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates
that every year about 38,000 deaf children are born in Southeast Asia.
This would mean that
every day over 100 deaf infants are born in the region.
Despite being the
most frequent sensory disability, deafness has received little attention
in the health development agenda, including in Indonesia.
The consequence of
this is the rapidly increasing burden of deafness. Deafness in infancy
and childhood has an immense impact on communication, education,
employment and quality of life in view of the years of deafness caused
by hearing impairments in infancy and childhood.
The Indonesian
population is estimated at 240 million and the estimated number of
hearing impaired children, is over 2 million.
This figure, however, could be underestimated
because, as in many developing countries, Indonesia (among other things)
is lacking resources for diagnosis and rehabilitation for hearing
impairment/deafness and the output of the available human resources such
as audiometricians, teachers of the deaf and speech therapists is less
than optimal because of a variety of reasons attributable to training,
deployment and work environment.
Furthermore, the WHO protocol for population-based
surveys in developing countries, does not adequately provide objective
detection for children aged younger than five years.
The most important
consequence of hearing loss in children is delayed speech and language
development.
This
delay can lead to social and emotional problems and the possibly of
academic failure. The longer a child's hearing loss remains undetected
and untreated the worse the outcome is likely to be.
In addition to its
individual effects, hearing loss makes a large contribution to the
burden of disease and it substantially affects social and economic
development in communities and countries. Childhood deafness accounts
for significant years of life lived with disability (YLD).
The WHO has used the
Global Burden of Disease (GBD) to assess the impact of an illness or
injury and hearing impairment is the 2nd leading cause of YLD and is the
15th leading contributor to GBD (2005).
The WHO has also estimated that two-thirds of those
with severe-profound hearing loss live in developing countries.
The majority of
hearing-impaired children found in hearing clinics and in schools for
the deaf in Indonesia are severely or profoundly deaf and most of them
live in poor socioeconomic conditions.
Hearing impairments in high-income countries have
been shown to have a very large financial cost.
For example, in
Australia, the real financial cost of hearing loss was US$11.75 billion
in 2005 and this cost does not take into account the net cost of the
loss of well-being (disease burden) associated with hearing loss, which
is a further $11.3 billion. This is also likely in low- and
middle-income countries.
Hearing impairment is, therefore, a cause and a consequence of
poverty, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
There is little data
available to document the impact on the poor, but it is evident that
poor people who also suffer hearing loss are doubly disadvantaged.
One of the reasons
why deafness receives little attention is due to a lack of
evidence-based information and the general lack of awareness on the
magnitude and consequences of deafness or hearing impairment in all
parts of society.
Therefore,
there is a lack of strong advocacy and a lack of political will to deal
with it, which leads to a lack of resources and programs.
The writer is a
PhD (research) candidate at Macquarie University & the Royal
Institute for the Deaf & Blind Children, Sydney
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