Would you rather be blind than deaf? That’s a tough question; humans need all senses available to learn about their surroundings and perform in life.
But millions of children are missing out every year. Vision and hearing impairment costs economies billions in productivity, but it inability to detect and treat them costs children their future potential.
Ear, nose and throat specialists have called for hearing screening of children at birth to detect possible hearing impairment. But that has not become a policy in Nigeria.
With only around 200 ENT specialists to service the entire country, parents and their children have to deal with long waiting time and exorbitant costs.
“Hearing screening is not mandatory. This means hearing loss in most children is only detected when they are in school and it is impacting on academic performance,” says Nausheen Dawood, audiologist with the HearX, a project using a mobile app to screen children for hearing loss in South Africa.
“It is better children are detected early so they can have better outcomes and increase the impact on performance.”
Several studies are still evaluating the prevalence of hearing or vision loss among Nigerian children.
Some are born with impairments to their hearing and vision. A study of 400 newborns in Benin City found the ears of 90 babies did not emit a natural sound that ears normally do, signaling damage to the inner ear. Another 26 had hearing loss in both ears and 64 in one.
Any could easily go undetected until children go into school. Another study followed 359 children in an inner city area of Lagos and found nearly 14 in 100 of them had a hearing loss of one form.
The researchers also found “significant association” between hearing loss and school performance.
“The early detection and management of hearing problems is relatively rare, thus precluding the determination of possible aetiological factors for the observed abnormalities,” they wrote.
“Poor public awareness, dearth of relevant facilities and the lack of early screening programmes are major known contributory factors.”
The same factors affect knowledge about sight loss.
Juliet Gbeswi was at the top of her game, but in 2013, her sight began to go. After tests and screenings, ophthalmologists declared her legally blind.
“Imagine growing to see your loved ones around you, and then one day, you can’t see them anymore,” she narrates in a testimonial she shared with a roomful of vision- and hearing-impaired people.
Some 36 million people are blind, according to data gathered by Seeing is Believing, an international campaign to tackle avoidable blindness and visual impairment.
A total 217 million are moderately or severely vision impaired, caused by anything from cataracts and scarring of the cornea to measles, vitamin deficiency, injuries and neonatal infections.
Almost 80% of vision impairment is preventable or curable, says Juliana Nathaniel, who directs Comprehensive Child Eye Health in Nigeria (CCEHiN), an SiB project to screen some 1.5 million children under age 14 across 11 states in Nigeria by 2020.
It is managed by Brien Holden Vision Institute and the international development group CBM.
“Vision impairment is associated with educational underachievement,” says Fatima Kyari, consultant ophthalmologist and West African chair of the International Agency for Prevention of Blindness, which partnered the bank Standard Chartered to start SiB in 2003.
“Giving a visually impaired child access to education improve their opportunity to lead improved lives.”
In the next two years, a $5m funding will pay for 27,500 spectacles, 27,443 refractions, 3,460 eye surgeries and training for thousands of teachers, health workers and eye care specialists hoping to reach out to 17 million people across Nigeria.
“We need the government to have a dedicated budget line for child eye health,” says Kirsty Smith, chief executive officer of CBM UK.
“This project finishes in two years, but we need it to go beyond 2020.”
Gbeswi, a psychologist, has gone through three different forms to rehabilitation to enable to cope with being blind—learnt how to use a cane, move around her home and work unaided, learnt to use apps that make it possible for her to use a phone or computer.
“Disability is in the mind,” says former president Olusegun Obasanjo stands, eye health ambassador. “If a blind man can do what others can do, then he is not blind, just differently abled.”
But only after they are empowered to compensate for loss of hearing or vision.