Page 3487 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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dollar terms but also in health terms. When you read this report, it is quite staggering. I will read selected parts from the report called Listen Hear—the economic impact and cost of hearing loss in Australia—done by Access Economics.
Before I get to that, if people are interested in the effect and the numbers in the ACT, they can get onto the Health First website and look up “Newborn Screening Testing”. The last paragraph says:
About 1 out of 1,000 infants are born deaf or with severe hearing loss. Infant hearing loss is screened for in the newborn when indicated and again at 3 months of age. If needed, therapy can begin before 6 months. If not detected before age 2, deafness will—
and it says “will”—
interfere with the child’s speech and language skills. Infant screening tests for hearing are quick and simple.
The fact that these programs continue under the current government is a good thing. I consulted with the ACT Deafness Resource Centre. Although one in a thousand will indicate that, with our birth rate at about 3,000 or 4,000, only three or four young Canberrans are affected. The information supplied to me from their experience suggests that the number can range from seven to 30 born per year in the ACT with hearing issues. That number is way too large. We need to take note of what causes it.
One in six Australians are affected by hearing loss. It is rising from less than one per cent for people aged younger than 15 years to three in every four people over 70 with a hearing problem. With the ageing population we have, by 2050 something like one in four Australians will have a hearing loss problem. The report goes on to say, “While interventions such as hearing aids and cochlear ear implants enhance a person’s ability to communicate, the majority of people with hearing loss”—about 85 per cent of them—“do not have such devices.” The report went on to look at the cost. It says:
In 2005, the real financial cost of hearing loss was $11.75 billion or 1.4% of GDP.
It says that it represents an average cost of $3,314 per person per annum for each of the 3.55 million Australians who have hearing loss—or for everyone, if you break it down further, $578. It goes on to say that the financial costs do not take into account the net cost of loss of wellbeing, which is called “disease burden” in the industry, associated with hearing loss, which is a further $11.3 billion.
We are talking about $23 billion of impact. I do not use these numbers in a callous way just to say that this is an economic thing. People have gone out to try and quantify what the effect of this is in something that we can understand. It says that the largest financial component is the loss of productivity, which is about $6.7 billion. The cost of informal care, it says, is the impact on the families, which is about $3.2 billion.
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