What's Happening In Illinois?
UNHS Day
The first-ever Universal Newborn Hearing Screening day in Illinois took place in 2005 at the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago. As proclaimed by Governor Rod Blagojevich, On April 11, 2008, the Universal Newborn Hearing Screening Day marked a day to recognize the importance of newborn hearing screening, follow-up, and early intervention. The event was sponsored by CHOICES for Parents, a coalition of parents and professionals throughout Illinois that promotes the health and development of children with newly identified hearing loss by providing their parents with immediate access to support, information and resources to help families make the best decisions they can for their children.
In 2002, the Illinois legislature mandated that all 135-plus birthing hospitals in the state must screen the hearing of newborns before babies go home from the hospital. Every day in America, according to the July 2003 edition of The Hearing Review, approximately 1 in 1,000 newborns--or 33 babies- are born profoundly deaf and another two or three of every 1,000 babies are born with a partial hearing loss, making hearing loss the number one disability among newborns in the United States. In Illinois, it is expected that 500 babies born every year have a hearing loss.
As stressed by speakers at the event, the earlier an infant is identified with a hearing loss, the earlier intervention services are put into place to encourage language development. Children identified with a hearing loss between birth and six months old have a receptive language of 200 words and expressive language of 117 words, whereas those identified between ages of 7 and 18 months have a receptive language of 86 words and expressive language of 54 words [1]. An undiagnosed deaf child aged three will only know about 25 words, compared to 700 words for a hearing child of the same age [2].
American Annals of the Deaf, 143, 416-424. The development of deaf and hard of hearing children identified through the high-risk registry. Yoshinaga-Itano, C. & Appusso, ML. 1998.
Yoshinaga-Itano, 1998, quoted in “The High Cost of Hearing Loss; What Our Publics Need to Know,” Donald Radcliffe, The Hearing Journal, May 1998, vol 51 no. 5.
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