Experts in the field of hearing healthcare answer your questions.
Q: I am a Veteran who suffers from the condition known as tinnitus. I welcome the possibility of relief. How do I obtain this? Does the Veterans Health Administration (VA) now have this available?
Q: Once a week I volunteer at church to work with the kids. I have noticed that some of the loud noises little children can make actually cause me physical pain. I feel like wearing ear muffs! Why are my ears so sensitive?
Q: I've heard that wood-burning stoves can cause ear infections in children. I'm concerned about my newborn because our wood stove is the only source of heat in our home. Is this true, and if so, can I do anything to prevent ear infection while still using the stove?
Kami and the Yaks by Andrea Stenn Stryer won the 2008 Schneider Family Book Award in the children's category. Set in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, Stryer tells the story of a deaf Sherpa boy who proves himself to his father by rescuing his family's yaks from a dangerous storm. The Schneider Family Book Awards were created by Dr. Katherine Schneider and are given annually by the American Library Association to honor an author or illustrator for a book that best represents a disability experience for children and teenagers.
Victory for Hearing in Alaska
In yet another residual success of the Deafness Research Foundation's National Campaign for Hearing Health, which heavily promoted universal newborn hearing screening, Alaska recently mandated every birthing facility in the state to provide newborn hearing screening within one month of birth. The goal is for any child who shows signs of hearing loss to be diagnosed within three months and begin receiving intervention services within six months. All hospitals in the state have the necessary equipment to screen each baby's hearing, to determine whether the mechanics of the ear are working properly and to evaluate the brain's ability to respond to sound. For more information on the mandate, visit the State of Alaska's website.
Accessible Kiosks at O’Hare International Airport
The Chicago Department of Aviation, along with the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, has installed the first accessible kiosk at O’Hare International Airport and more are on the way. Each new kiosk is equipped with a public access videophone, a multilingual touch screen monitor providing airport transportation and tourist information, an overhead plasma monitor that features accessibility information about tourist attractions in the City of Chicago, streaming text announcements, and it is wheelchair accessible. Eight more kiosks are planned for the upper and lower levels of the terminals and Bus/Shuttle Center at O’Hare and two kiosks are planned for Midway International Airport. For more visit: www.flychicago.com/news/pdf/AccessibleKiosks7-25-07.pdf.
Deafness Research Foundation won a 2006 Apex Award of Excellence in health and medical writing for the feature "Bad Bugs, Bad Bugs, Whatcha Gonna Do?" published in the winter 2005 issue of Hearing Health magazine. The award-winning entry created awareness on the number one bacterial and viral killers of infants, group B streptococcal bacteria (GBS) and cytomegalovirus (CMV), both of which also cause hearing loss in survivors. Despite their prevalence — affecting an estimated 25 percent of pregnancies &mdash neither "bad bug" is very well known and, at present, no vaccine is available.
