With Gov. Murkowski's signing of House Bill 109 into law last week, Alaska became the 40th state in the nation to require a hearing screening for all infants before they leave the hospital or within 30 days of birth if they're not born in a hospital.
Health mandates should not be passed lightly--and this one has been floated in Juneau several times before--but this one is good for our kids, schools and our state.

Hearing loss or deafness is the most common birth defect, with three in 1,000 testing positive nationally, said Debbie Golden, director of program services for the March of Dimes in Alaska.

The hearing screening comes in addition to another screening that has been done for decades and that parents commonly recogonize as the "heel prick test," a mandatory metabolic screening that looks for dozens of other potential congenital conditions, none of which is as prevalent as hearing problems. 

The problem is that most children are not diagnosed with hearing deficiencies until age 2 or 3, and by that time opportunities for assistance--or perhaps medical solutions--have passed that can never be regained, Golden said.

This idea is one of those ounce-of-prevention measures. Spending a little up front helps defray potential greater costs later. A child whose issues are addressed early in life has less need for costly public assistance later.

A passage in the bill mandates that insurance companies rewrite their policies by Jan. 1, 2008. However, most insurance companies cover the screenings now, and at least some spoke in favor of this bill. That should tell us something.

With federal grants in place to boost the program the next two years, this was the right year for the legislation, sponsored by Rep. Jay Ramras, R-Fairbanks, to gain approval.

Current, voluntary, programs are running fairly well, but roughly 1,300 Alaska babies still are not screened annually, Golden said.

The federal grants, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and through the Health Services Resource Administration, are in place to continue to assist voluntary efforts and to help establish the mandatory program, according to Stephanie Birch, section chief for women's, children's and family health with the state Division of Public Health.

The grants also will be used to solidify a monitoring and database system to track results of screenings, Birch said. Another key provision of the bill calls for creation of a statewide database and for annual reports on results of the screenings.

The federal grants carry the program through fiscal '08, in time for the state's mandatory program to ramp up and keep things running, Birch said. The state's fiscal note for the program starts out at about $40,000 and will be less than $100,000 a year when fully implemented, she said.

The equipment to carry out screenings can be expensive for health institutions in smaller towns, but service organizations, especially Lions clubs, have helped purchase the equipment in several locations around Alaska. Larger institutions, such as Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, have had the equipment and have been doing the screenings for many years.

In addition to the screenings, important parts of this legislation encourage diagnostic follow-up within three months for those who screen positive, and thearapy or assistance, for those who need it, within six months.

This is a bit of legislation from this year's session that all Alaskans can feel good about. It helps children and parents and in the long run makes Alaska a healthier state.

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