program will have Prof.Larry

Humes from the University of Indiana as keynote speaker this

year. Dr. Humes is an expert in auditory perception, with an spe-

cial interest in the effects of

hearing impairment and aging on auditory perception. Visit the

congress website for more infor-mation as well as registration

forms .

Blessings for the week.

Enjoy the e-zine.

Dirk Lourens & Cara Hollander Editors: E-zine

Yes, it is still icy cold and yes, we

still can’t get over it. Welcome to another chilly e-zine...chilly due to

our current climate and not be-

cause of our content of course.

With the schools starting up again we’ve initiated our thaw-phase

from our winter holiday lethargy and moving into higher gears to

change the world one patient at a

time.

With the year going at the speed of light we are also speedily ap-

proaching the 2012 SASLHA/SAAA/ENT Conference which will be held

from 3-6 November 2012 at Sun

City. The Speech-Language Therapy

program will include 8 distin-guished researchers from the In-

ternational Association of Logope-dics and Phoniatrics (IALP) that will

be presenting a series of lectures

on Motor Speech Disorders in adults and chi ldren. V is it

www. ia lp. info/motor -speech-disorders-committee-pg16135.html

for more information. The Audiology

Children exposed to HIV in the womb may be more like-ly to experience hearing loss by age 16 than are their un-exposed peers, according to scientists in a National Insti-tutes of Health research net-work.

The researchers estimated that hearing loss affects 9 to 15 percent of HIV-infected children and 5 to 8 percent of children who did not have HIV at birth but whose moth-ers had HIV infection during pregnancy. Study partici-pants ranged from 7 to 16 years old.

The researchers defined hearing loss as the level at

which sounds could be de-tected, when averaged over four frequencies important for speech understanding (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hertz), that was 20 decibels or higher than the normal hearing level for adolescents or young adults in either ear.

"Children exposed to HIV before birth are at higher risk for hearing difficulty, and

it's important for them―and the health pro-viders who care for them―to be aware of this," said George K. Siberry, M.D., of the Pediatric, Ado-lescent, and Maternal AIDS Branch of the Eunice Ken-nedy Shriver National Insti-tute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute that leads the research network.

The study was published online in The Pediatric In-fectious Disease Journal.

Compared to national aver-ages for other children their

J-J-J-July Jitters

I N S I D E T H I S

I S S U E :

Word of wel-

come

1

Academic Cor-

ner: HIV and

Hearing Loss

1

TECH Talk:

More on i-Pads

3

New Middle

Ear Micro-

phone gets

research atten-

tion

5

Fun Facts 6

Contact your

Counsel

6

Academic Corner: Children Exposed to HIV in the Womb at

Increased Risk for Hearing Loss

E-zine.com July 2012

Continued on pg. 2

Hang on guys. We’ll beat the freeze!

P A G E 2

age, children with HIV infection were about 200 to 300 percent more likely to have a hearing loss. Children whose mothers had HIV during pregnancy but who them-selves were born without HIV were 20 percent more likely than to have hearing loss.

More than 200 children and teen-agers participated in this study conducted as part of the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Cohort Study network, led by NICHD. All had been ex-posed to HIV before birth, and about 60 percent were HIV-positive at the time of the study. Researchers conducted hearing tests on the children if their par-

ents or caregivers had reported hearing problems, they had low scores on a standard test of lan-guage or their health care provid-ers detected hearing problems during standard hearing screen-ings.

The researchers classified partici-pants who could not hear tones below a certain volume as having hearing loss with difficulties in quiet and noisy settings. The re-searchers documented a greater proportion of hearing loss cases among HIV-positive children and found that those who had devel-oped AIDS at any point were even more likely to have hearing

loss -- even if the disease was under control at the time of the study.

Earlier studies have found that children with HIV are suscepti-ble to middle ear infections. Re-peated middle ear infections can cause hearing loss. However, in 60 percent of cases in the study, hearing loss was the result of problems with the transmission of sound from the nerves of the ear to the brain, rather than to damage in the middle ear result-ing from ear infec-tions.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/12

Continued from pg 1

TECH TALK: iPad Technology in Speech Therapy

P A G E 3

After receiving some very positive responses to our previous TECH article about practical ways of us-

ing i-Pads as a therapy modality, we decided to investigate and share some more resources in this con-

tinuously expanding therapy tool. We visited http://communicationtherapy.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/ipad-

technology-in-speech-therapy-overview/ and came across the Communication Therapy Blog which offers

insight, resources and guidance in rems of i-Pad use in Speech-Language Therapy. We have included

an excerpt from the site to wet your appetite...

P A G E 4

Evidence in the Field of Communication Pathology

Tuesday 7 August 2012

EVIDENCE in the field of COMMUNICATION PATHOLOGY: half-day course on 7 AUGUST 2012 at Depart-

ment of Communication Pathology in TUKS - 5 CPD points

Register now !!!

Presented by

PROF DR EDWIN MAAS,

Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Science

University of Arizona

Organised by Course Coordinator:

Department of Communication Pathology Nathalie van Waeyenberge

(University of Pretoria) E-mail: Nathalie.VanWaeyenberge@gmail.com

SPEECH THERAPY POSITION: Pretoria, Gauteng

The Baby Therapy Centre in Pretoria requires a part time Speech- Language Therapist (15 hours per week). The candidate must be fluent in both English and Afrikaans and have 1-2 years experience handling babies and toddlers under the age of three years.

Must be able to work independently and as part of a therapy team with a transdisciplinary and interdisci-plinary approach.

RESTORING HEARING WITH DISCRETE DEVICE: A MIDDLE-EAR MICROPHONE FOR

MORE CONVENIENT COCHLEAR IMPLANTS ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) — Cochle-ar implants have restored basic hearing to some 220,000 deaf people, yet a microphone and related electronics must be worn outside the head, raising reliability issues, preventing patients from swimming and creating social stig-ma. Now, a University of Utah engineer and colleagues in Ohio have developed a tiny prototype microphone that can be implanted in the middle ear to avoid such problems. The proof-of-concept device has been successfully tested in the ear canals of four cadavers, the researchers report in a study just published online in the Insti-tute of Electrical and Electronics Engi-neers journal Transactions on Biomedi-cal Engineering. The prototype -- about the size of an eraser on a pencil -- must be reduced in size and improved in its ability to detect quieter, low-pitched sounds, so tests in people are about three years away, says the study's senior author, Darrin J. Young, an associate professor of electri-cal and computer engineering at the University of Utah and USTAR, the Utah Science Technology and Research initi-ative. The study showed incoming sound is transmitted most efficiently to the micro-phone if surgeons first remove the incus or anvil -- one of three, small, middle-ear bones. U.S. Food and Drug Admin-istration approval would be needed for an implant requiring such surgery. The current prototype of the packaged, middle-ear microphone measures 2.5-by-6.2 millimeters (roughly one-tenth by one-quarter inch) and weighs 25 milli-grams, or less than a thousandth of an ounce. Young wants to reduce the pack-age to 2-by-2 millimeters.

Problems with External Parts on Cochlear Implants The National Institutes of Health says almost 220,000 people worldwide with profound deafness or severe hearing impairment have received cochlear im-plants, about one-third of them in the United States, where two-fifths of the recipients are children. In conventional cochlear implant, there are three main parts that are worn exter-nally on the head behind the ear. Im-planted under the skin behind the ear are a receiver and stimulator to convert the sound signals into electric impulses, which then go through a cable to be-tween four and 16 electrodes that wind through the cochlea of the inner ear and stimulate auditory nerves so the patient can hear. "It's a disadvantage having all these things attached to the outside" of the

head, Young says. "Imagine a child wearing a microphone behind the ear. It causes problems for a lot of activities. Swimming is the main issue. And it's not convenient to wear these things if they have to wear a helmet." Young adds that "for adults, it's social perception. Wearing this thing indicates you are somewhat handicapped and that actually prevents quite a percentage of candidates from getting the implant. They worry about the negative image." As for reliability, "if you have wires con-nected from the microphone to the coil, those wires can break," he says.

How Sound Moves in normal ears, Cochlear Implants and the new device Sound normally moves into the ear canal and makes the eardrum vibrate. The stapes or stirrup touches the cochlea. Hair cells on the cochlea's inner mem-brane move, triggering the release of a neurotransmitter chemical that carries the sound signals to the brain. In profoundly deaf people who are candi-dates for cochlear implants, the hair cells don't work for a variety of reasons, in-cluding birth defects, side effects of drugs, exposure to excessively loud sounds or infection by certain viruses. In a cochlear implant, the microphone, signal processor and transmitter coil worn outside the head send signals to the internal receiver-stimulator, which is implanted in bone under the skin and sends the signals to the electrodes im-planted in the cochlea to stimulate audi-tory nerves. The ear canal, eardrum and hearing bones are bypassed. The system developed by Young im-plants all the external components. Sound moves through the ear canal to the eardrum, which vibrates as it does normally. But at the umbo, a sensor known as an accelerometer is attached to detect the vibration. The sensor also is attached to a chip, and together they serve as a microphone that picks up the sound vibrations and converts them into electrical signals sent to the electrodes in the cochlea.

The device still would require patients to wear a charger behind the ear while sleeping at night to recharge an implant-ed battery. Young says he expects the battery would last one to several days between charging. Young says the microphone also might be part of an implanted hearing aid that could replace conventional hearing aids for a certain class of patients who have degraded hearing bones unable to ade-quately convey sounds from convention-al hearing aids.

Testing the Microphone in Cadavers

Conventional microphones include a mem-brane or diaphragm that moves and gen-erates an electrical signal change in re-sponse to sound. But they require a hole through which sound must enter -- a hole that would get clogged by growing tissue if implanted. So Young's middle-ear micro-phone instead uses an accelerometer -- a 2.5-microgram mass attached to a spring -- that would be placed in a sealed package with a low-power silicon chip to convert sound vibrations to outgoing electrical signals. The package is glued to the umbo so the accelerometer vibrates in response to ear-drum vibrations. The moving mass gener-ates an electrical signal that is amplified by the chip, which then connects to the con-ventional parts of a cochlear implant: a speech processor and stimulator wired to the electrodes in the cochlea. "Everything is the same as a conventional cochlear implant, except we use an im-plantable microphone that uses the vibra-tion of the bone," Young says. To test the new microphone, the research-ers used the temporal bones -- bones at the side of the skull -- and related ear ca-nal, eardrum and hearing bones from four cadaver donors. The researchers inserted tubing with a small loudspeaker into the ear canal and generated tones of various frequencies and loudness. As the sounds were picked up by the implanted microphone, the re-searchers used a laser device to measure the vibrations of the tiny ear bones. They found the umbo -- where the eardrum con-nects to the hammer or malleus -- pro-duced the greatest sound vibration, partic-ularly if the incus or anvil bone first was removed surgically.

The experiments showed that when the prototype microphone unit was attached to the umbo, it could pick up medium pitches at conversational volumes, but had trouble detecting quieter, low-frequency sounds. Young plans to improve the microphone to pick up quieter, deeper, very low pitches. In the tests, the output of the microphone went to speakers; in a real person, it would send sound to the implanted speech pro-cessor. To demonstrate the microphone, Young also used it to record the start of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony while im-planted in a cadaver ear. It is easily recog-nizable, even if somewhat fuzzy and muf-fled.

"The muffling can be filtered out," says Young.

Example of the middle ear mic.

DESIGNATION NAME EMAIL ADDRESS President Cathy Pringle pringlep@icon.co.za

Vice-President Dirk Lourens dirklourens777@yahoo.com

Treasurer Cornel du Preez cvdberg@etime.co.za

Professional Liaison Officer Jane Herbert herberts@mweb.co.za

Office Manager Claudine Emmerick admin@saslha.co.za

Ethics and Standards Chair Susan Swart susanm.swart@telkomsa.net

Prof Development Officer Anita Edwards aedwards@csir.co.za

SAJCD Editor in Chief Janan Dietrich dietrichtj@hivsa.com

CPD Anita Edwards aedwards@csir.co.za

University Alliance Sandra du Plessis dsandra@ul.ac.za

Communiphon Editor Cara Hollander chollander@netactive.co.za

Academic Conference Program Co-ordinator Dr.Anna-Marie Olivier annamari@iafrica.com

Coding Chairperson Alison Dent dentfamily@absamail.co.za

PR and Marketing Chairperson Nicole de Rocha darocha.nicole@gmail.com

Zone One Representative Dr.Priya Rajaram priyavtrust@yahoo.com

Zone Two Representative Erica Bostock erikab@social.mpu.gov.za

Zone Three Representative Ingrid von Bentheim speechrx@xsinet.co.za

Zone Four Representative Anneline Jack ajack@mweb.co.za

SASLHA OFFICE DETAILS

OFFICE MANAGER: Mrs Claudine Emmerick LOCAL TEL: 0861 113 297

OFFICE HOURS: Mondays - Fridays 8h00 - 15h00 INT TEL: +27 (0)41 3794253 (During School Holidays: Mondays – Fridays 07h00 -14h00) FAX: +27 (0)41 3795388

POSTAL ADDRESS: PO Box 10813, Linton Grange, 6015 Port Elizabeth EMAIL: admin@saslha.co.za

2012 National Council Contact Details