PARENTS of deaf children yesterday charged that the state’s refusal until five years ago to look into the potential of cochlear implants had left dozens of children completely deaf.
The deaf children’s parents association told the House Human Rights Committee that the authorities kept ignoring their calls for cochlear prosthesis for four years, between 1996 and 2000.
A cochlear implant is an electronic device designed to provide sound information for adults and children who have a profound sensironeural hearing loss (nerve deafness) in both ears and show no ability to understand speech through hearing aids.
The association told the committee that the procedure could have stopped or improved deafness and should be carried out at a young age.
The chairman of the association, Marios Tempriotis, said the procedure started on children on an extended scale in the 1990s.
Tempriotis said the association showed an interest early on, but unfortunately they were met with the refusal of officials at the Makarios children’s hospital in Nicosia.
In 1996, the association took action to find information on their own, Tempriotis said.
Members were sent abroad at their own expense, attending seminars and gathering information.
At the same time the association pushed for the procedure to be introduced on young children in Cyprus, but to no avail.
“We faced a wall of refusal,” he told the committee.
Only five years ago did then health minister Frixos Savvides finally embrace their request and the procedure started to be implemented on the island, but too late for many children, Tempriotis said.
“Imagine that in four years, dozens of children who would have had the advantage of an implant are now completely deaf,” he added.
Cochlear implants bypass damaged hair cells and convert speech and environmental sounds into electrical signals and send these signals to the hearing nerve.
The implant consists of a small electronic device, which is surgically implanted under the skin behind the ear, and an external speech processor, which is usually worn on a belt or in a pocket. A microphone is also worn outside the body as a headpiece behind the ear to capture incoming sound. The speech processor translates the sound into distinctive electrical signals.
These ‘codes’ travel up a thin cable to the headpiece and are transmitted across the skin via radio waves to the implanted electrodes in the cochlea. The electrodes’ signals stimulate the auditory nerve fibers to send information to the brain where it is interpreted as meaningful sound.
