WORLD
Stem cell deafness breakthrough won`t kill off the Deaf community
Baku, September 14 (AZERTAC). A huge breakthrough in deafness research was announced this week, when for the first time stem cells were shown to improve hearing in animals.
The prospect of using the treatment on humans is a few years away, but eventually it could be used to treat a condition called auditory neuropathy, which affects about 15% of deaf people in Britain. Since one in six people in the UK have some level of hearing loss, stem cell treatment could potentially change the lives of 1.5 million people
Deafness is often thought of as a hidden disability, and consequently, most people don`t know just how much variety there is behind the deaf experience. For starters, there isn`t one "type" of deaf person, because levels of hearing loss range from mild to profound. Some people can hear just enough to use the phone, others depend on lip reading or use sign language. Of the 10 million people in the UK with some level of deafness, more than 6 million are of retirement age. Many find it hard to adapt to hearing aids (indeed, the majority don`t wear them at all) and would almost certainly embrace the chance to hear in as natural a way as possible.
For one person a treatment to make a deaf person into a hearing person would be a godsend, for another it`s like wiping out a culture. Neither are wrong – they`re simply different people, with different experiences, who live in different worlds.