 We have allowed health workers to check the hearing status of people in their communities. Before we get to really what the World Health Organization, the message they were trying to send to people, can you kindly explain to people out there who don't know what hearing instrument specialist means? Can you tell us what do you specialize in and what is your work all about? Okay, thank you very much. As you heard, I'm Isaac Ohome. I'm a hearing instrument specialist. What this means is that it's an area of just specialization in terms of hearing, everything to do with hearing sciences. So currently in the country only three of us have been trained as hearing instrument specialists, but it's a globally trained profession. Most of it is done outside the country. But we work hand in hand with the ear, nose and throat doctors as well as the audiologists and the audiology technicians in terms of helping people with their hearing loss and balance and noise in the ears. Okay, so when we talk about hearing instrument specialist, do we have a specific instrument or what falls under the instrument? So under instrument is basically these medical devices that are used to help with hearing. So they could be hearing aids, they could be cochlear implants, they could be anything that is used in terms of hearing and of course advising in terms of even the telecare instruments that are used for hearing. Anything to do with hearing, any instrument that is medically derived instrument. So the theme for 2019, the wild hearing day was check your hearing. So the wild health organization is basically telling us that whether you've experienced a problem with your hearing, whether you've not, you should make an initiative and go check it. So how do we now get to convince people? Because telling someone probably was never had a challenge to go and have their ears checked, probably they may not take it serious. So what is the importance of every person going to have their hearing checked? Basically what we are saying is that hearing loss is invisible. It's painless and it's something that really affects everybody in the community and in essence it starts slowly. It creeps in slowly and it affects the general society and how you're interacting with other people. So when people are saying they cannot be able to hear well, when they're asking you to repeat several times, it means there's a problem. And you know hearing loss basically progresses from just becoming hearing loss, it becomes hearing impairment. When you have an impairment is that you are not able to function properly and then you become disabled such that you are not able to function properly and then at the end of the day you become handicapped and when you are saying you are handicapped it means that you cannot connect with the society. If it is children they cannot go to normal school because they can't hear. So what the Wcho is saying is that the number of people with hearing loss is increasing every other day. We are saying currently we have 466 million people in the world with hearing loss and the number projection by 2050 the number will be 950 million. Now in Kenya and countries especially developing countries like Kenya the numbers is unknown because people are not going to hospital to check their hearing. People are just at home they are withdrawing. And hearing loss they tend to withdraw from the rest of the community because they don't want to ask you every other time come on I can't hear you. So the number is increasing that's why Wcho is aging every other person through the applications that they have launched that you don't need to go to hospital to check your hearing. Of course you have some symptoms just download the application and do the testing at home and the application will tell you you have a problem you can basically look for us. When we now we are talking about the numbers you said 460 million people in the world are we talking about people who are totally deaf but are we talking about people who have minimum hearing. So basically 466 million in the population are people who have already been diagnosed with hearing loss. According to Kenya National Society for the Deaf in Kenya alone the number some years back was more than 800,000 people with hearing loss and that number is increasing according to a research survey that was done although the results are still preliminary close to 7.5% of people with hearing loss have already been identified outside there. So you are looking at a prevalence of around 4 to 16% which is a really huge percent of people already with hearing loss and you know the number is really increasing. There is a lot of things that we shall talk about that are predisposing people to hearing loss and you realize the population is big and that's why on the 3rd of March we have started a journey together with the world head organization to sensitize people and to tell people that if you have a hearing loss there is a solution out there that you need to take care of your hearing. So now let's talk of cases whereby we find that there may be 2 people or 3 people in a family who are suffering from hearing loss whether someone has challenges they have to use the gadgets that are there to help them hear better or totally deaf. Can we say that it is an irreditory problem? Is it? Basically there are so many causes of hearing loss. Of course number one we say there are cases where we can't identify where the hearing loss came from but there are some things that have been found and they are common that are causing hearing loss. One of them is irreditory. If it is a family history of hearing loss there are chances that someone in the family could have a hearing loss. Of course we have infections which is the other common cause of hearing loss. People with past that is discharging from their ears. In infections like meningitis people who have misos, rubella and so on those are some of the causes of hearing loss apart from the fact that it can be irreditory. It can run in a family. Okay, so now talking about check your hearing. Let's say I have followed all the instructions that have been given by the World Health Organization on the application on how to get to know my problem and I now know of it. How now do we control it? How do we now rectify the problem that a person is going to realize that they have? So basically what we are saying is that this is a public platform for people just to check their hearing at home and once you find there is a problem with your hearing then you need to involve now an expert. An expert can be an audiologist can be like hearing instrument specialist can be your ear nose and throat so that we can check exactly what is the problem. Now there are common things that can cause hearing loss like wax in the ear. Maybe a child who has put something in the ear like a paper or a foreign body in the ear those are things that if you go to a local hospital just around you then it can be rectified. You can come back to the society and interact back to the society with the normal hearing loss. So we have permanent causes of hearing loss and those things that can be removed they can be eradicated. Things like wax, things like foreign body, things like infections that can be treated. So in essence what we are saying is that there are things that have been identified that can cause hearing loss by doing your own check at home and then you realize there is a problem or even there are other symptoms that we shall talk about that you can identify and say of course I can't be able to hear well. There are some people when you are walking around the streets you can't hear a bell of a bicycle you can't hear in the morning the birds definitely there is a problem so you need to consult your local doctor especially ENT specialist, audiologist and the other team members. Okay, so now how do we then get to identify or how do I realize that a baby that I have at home or my elder sister or someone around me is suffering from hearing loss because I'm sure that probably for a baby for a young person and an adult those are two different cases so maybe you can deal with each case how do we get to tell a child is now losing their hearing loss. So basically the way hearing is is that for children and infants the technology is there especially infants new born to detect and identify their hearing loss. Immediately they are born we do some tests and we identify and tell them whether they have a hearing loss or not and if they have a hearing loss definitely we follow up. Now the other category is children nowadays we are seeing mothers that are coming so late when the child is not able to speak that's the time they are coming to hospital and when they are coming to hospital the child is around 5 years 6 years which is too late because they want a child to go to school at that point and they have realized that the child cannot be able to talk now there are obvious things that you can see from a child and identify and say for sure my child is not able to hear well one of them is they become so inattentive they are not attentive you tend to repeat or speak louder when you speak louder is when you see them turning around following a conversation the other thing is that at home for adults or older people they tend to raise the volume of the televisions or maybe when they are speaking on their phone their phone is so loud that if you are sitting next to them you will be able to hear the whole conversation or even when they are talking they shout some of them will be attentive some gestures they will give you that they will tell you they are not able to hear and you know in adults basically they will be able to say by themselves that I can't be able to hear properly the moment they start saying that the moment you start repeating words when you are talking to them you definitely need your hearing checked okay we know that hearing is part of the ENT it falls under the ENT so would you tell us what is the relation between where we find that there is a deaf person and they may be deaf and dumb what is the relation between the two okay so basically just to review the fact that you are saying deaf and dumb nowadays you are not using that term we are just saying that these people are challenged they are challenged in terms of hearing now the relationship between hearing and speech is one if a child cannot be able to hear definitely the child will never be able to speak you know it's like a bucket every word you give to a child they will be able to speak it back so number one sign of a child who is not able to speak is that they are not able to hear now if they cannot be able to hear throughout their life they will never be able to speak and that is a challenge that you are saying so now if this child is identified early that has a hearing loss and then a device like a cochlear implant or a hearing aid is given then they will be able now to perceive the signals of speech and they will be able to speak back so you know most of the children that are deaf down there and they cannot be able to speak is because the problem has been since their child since they are small babies so we are saying that we need to start even checking our children as early as the first time they are born we need to take them to hospital or institutions that can be able to do early identifications and screening of these children so now what about in cases whereby someone has been born with a very good hearing and maybe probably at the age of 20 or 22 this person now starts to lose their hearing and maybe sometimes with people who have now become deaf but probably like half of their lives they could hear very well and also we have the older people people getting at the age of 90 the age of 80 and they start losing their hearing so we are saying in essence naturally we tend to lose our hearing loss naturally by the age of 30 the hearing starts to reduce by the time you are 65 what we call the senior citizen basically the hearing goes down by the time you are 90 not all people sometimes it is determined on many factors like genetic factors like how you have been using your hearing before if you have been clubbing you have been in an industry like the matatu industry that is so loud and you know the hearing the way it is there are small small hairs inside the ear the ear so these ears they break down when you expose to some medications when you expose to loud sounds and so on so you realize with age your hearing loss will depreciate but it will depreciate much faster depending on the factors that you have been exposed to so we are saying that you can lose your hearing at any time there are people who lose their hearing immediately there are people who get a call or a viral infection that affects their hearing and you lose your hearing immediately there are people who basically have fluids behind the ear and the other question you are asking the relationship between hearing and ENT you know the the hearing system is so well interconnected with the nose through a tube that is called the stretch and tube this is a tube that basically balances the air and the pressures between the ear and the nose so in between if you have a cold or something that is obstructing the nose basically it means that even the middle part of your ear can get obstructed and accumulate a lot of fluid and basically affect your hearing so that's how the connection so usually conditions that are affecting the nose conditions that are affecting the throat they can in essence affect even the ear so that's how the interrelation between the ENT and the ideologies and the people who are practicing hearing senses are interrelated and they work as a team and the other team members is the speech pathologist there is no way you can be done as speech therapist or speech sessions without a hearing device you have to hear so for that for the person who is doing the speech therapist can be able to help you so we have those some of the remedies that we are improvising the hearing aids there are different types of hearing aids the some that are fitting inside the ear the some that are going behind the ear then we have the surgically implanted cochlear implants that can also help with the hearing loss so we have the team members like the speech therapist the ideologies and the ENT that we work together now the biggest problem right now that we have is people either on their earphones listening to very loud music we have matatus whereby sometimes you sit in a matatu the music is too loud that you can literally feel something in your ears so what dangers are we exposing ourselves to because someone may think that I'm just having fun but where do we have now to draw the limit and know that these earphones as much as we like them as much as they help us when we want to entertain ourselves they can also be of danger to us basically what you are saying is that hearing loss can come what you are talking about is the noise induced hearing loss and we have the two types of noise induced this one we call the occupational where you are earning your daily you know bread from work and you know like a plant operator or somewhere or somebody who is working with like he is just doing like a miller those people it's occupation this is what you do every other day so you can be exposed to that noise and it can lead to hearing loss so HRs and institutions like OSHA has come up with measures that you have to do a baseline hearing test for these people they have to have ear protective mechanism like the ear plugs or ear muffs so that they are protected and then you have to look at the duration of time that you are exposed to and then now you are talking about the other one which is the recreational type of hearing loss and being recreational is where now you know clubbing comes in and the earphones that we are using and you know you can lose your hearing suddenly or slowly depending on how much noise you are exposed to of course nowadays we are glad that Nema has taken the initiative together with the ministry of transport to make sure that these legislations are being followed up so that the matatus that we are entering in we are not going to enjoy the music and at the same time lose our hearing immediately we leave the matatus and of course the other thing that is now common is the duration of time of the earphones you see people walking around with the earphones you see children that are giving home works they are also on computers every time with that of course you as a parent one thing you can do for your children is that you can set the limit of the volume that they are using and this way you can do applications like the hear angel you can download that application and set some password and they will never exceed that volume how often because time is really not with us right now how often should we have our hearing checked so the WTO is saying that once you have this application just download it and make sure every time there is a change in hearing make sure you do that number two for people who are working in places that are noisy at least have your check once in a year or any time there is a change do your hearing test of course if you notice there are some you can't be able to hear properly and people have to repeat words for you to hear if you're television you have to increase the volume of your television and either or your phone mobile phone then have your hearing checked okay thank you very much Isaac for really finding time to share with us because I'm quite sure this is very new information to people out there and that is all we hand for you tonight if you're watching us from a tomb you've had frequently have your hearing checked download the application from the World Health Organization platform and have your hearing checked oftenly you can do it at the comfort of your home thank you very much for being with us my name is Patricia Moriuki to have yourselves a very good night