Also from the above article - “[Dr Colin Kennedy] said that until now it had not been certain whether universal screening of newborn babies for hearing impairment had any effect on the child’s later verbal abilities”!

And the conclusion in the abstract of the NEJM articlestates that “Early detection of childhood hearing impairment was associated with higher scores for language [as compared to nonverbal ability] but not for speech in midchildhood”, which doesn’t seem particularly obvious to me. Thought that was quite interesting and rather counterintuitive.

The Southampton press release is a bit more informative than the BBC article too.

Notwithstanding the above what I dislike about this sort of discussion is the suggestion (possibly unintentional but the reason I get annoyed) that people who work in academia (who generally are poorly paid on short-term contracts with very little job security) do so to state the bleedin’ obvious, rather than actually being a very committed group of people seeking definitive answers to questions that are important to the well-being of society.

“Gwen Carr, director of UK services for the National Deaf Children’s Society, said she welcomed the research, which backs earlier studies showing the longer-term benefits of early screening.”

So it appears that this research had been done before. To the best of my knowledge it *has* been proved conclusively that hearing screening is a good thing, and that the test they were using previously (infant distraction test) was a complete waste of time for all concerned.

Remember the coffee one?

About 10 years ago in one of the western states, a $150,000 study was carried out to find out whether the sound of jets taking off and landing disturbed horses.

More recently, the government spent $500K advertising that beginning on such and such a date they were no longer going to be charging a fee for such and such a service. When really, how long would it take for word to get around that it wasn’t being charged anymore.