THE English-speaking Caribbean’s first ever cochlear implant is to be performed at Jamaica’s Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) on December 3.

The implant is to be undertaken through the collaborative effort of the recently formed Caribbean Hearing Health Foundation (CHHF) and the Johns Hopkins University, under a joint hearing health initiative that has been five years in the making.

The person to benefit from the surgery is a teacher, whose name was up to yesterday being withheld by Dr Aye Thwin who, along with Foundation president Dr Ediel Brown, will perform the surgery next month.

Thwin is an ENT specialist with a Master’s in audiology, while Brown is an otolaryngologist.

Thwin, who is also the secretary of the CHHF, said the teacher is employed with the School for the Deaf and holds a Master’s in counselling.

“She has been having hearing loss from she was small. She is wearing hearing aids right now, but it is not helping her.

She is still not hearing very well and because of that she has a drawback with her profession,” the specialist said of the teacher. “She cannot progress as much as she would like although she is very bright and quite talented.”

The teacher, she said, opted for the cochlear implant that would typically cost US$60,000 for the device and the surgery. However, through the efforts of the CHHF and Johns Hopkins, the cost of the surgery will be substantially less. The implant device is being offered by Cochlear America at a cost of only US$20,000 while the cost of the surgery will be J$20,000.

The beneficiary of the operation will help to foot the costs, in tandem with donations.

The procedure is to see the placement of an internal device into the cochlea (inner ear), directly stimulating the auditing nerves to facilitate learning to hear and the interpretation of speech and sound.

“It is like a ray of electrode that is inserted in the cochlea itself. The external part (of the device) is the speech processor with a microphone, which is put behind the ear and that microphone will pick up the voices, which is processed in the speech processor and then transferred into the receiver which is underneath the skin behind the ear,” Thwin said. “That transmitter transmits sounds into electrode, which is in the cochlea and that will stimulate the nerve fibre. That is how a person perceives sound.”

She said the external part of the device is easy to disconnect since it is held together with the internal device via a magnet. And the benefits, Thwin added, extend beyond that.

“What I want to stress is that the difference between the hearing aid and the cochlear implant is that hearing aid just makes the sounds louder where as the cochlear implant actually stimulates the nerve so that they not only hear the voices but they will actually be able to hear the other sounds, the environmental sounds,” she said.

Damage to some of the nerves in the inner ear, she said, will not take away from the effectiveness of the implant.

“If there is damage to some of the nerve fibres, it will still work with the rest of the nerve fibres,” she said.

The Caribbean Hearing Health Foundation is comprised of parents and various hearing health professionals, including ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialists, audiologists, speech and language pathologists.

The foundation, which was formed earlier this year in association with the Caribbean Association of Otolaryngologists and the Jamaica Association for the Deaf, facilitates the improved management options for the deaf and hearing-impaired. Their specific objectives include:

. the establishment of an affordable audiology service to facilitate testing for persons to determine the extent of their hearing loss;

. the dissemination of information as to the treatment options for persons with hearing disabilities; and

. the early detection of hearing loss in children.

“It has been proven that the earlier you give them (children) the amplification, the better they do. So for that objective we plan also to do newborn hearing screening and early rehabilitation,” Thwin explained.

In the meantime, she said that there was greater need for public education as regards hearing impairment.

“We also need to get more public awareness when it comes to hearing health because people need to just be aware of the importance and how productive it can be if the child can go to the normal school and learn the same way as the normal hearing child. They can become anything they want. The sky is the limit,” she said.

Thwin said that in addition to hearing aids and mechanisms like the cochlear implant, options open to hearing-impaired persons include the FM system. That system allows students to pick up the speech of teachers who use a microphone.

– williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com