Hearing loss in Mozambique: current data from Inhambane Province

Mozambique is a developing African country recuperating from a lengthy civil war. As a result, documenting the incidence of hearing loss has remained a low priority. This paper provides results from work being carried out by the Mozambique Audiology Program (MAP), which is a philanthropic effort established in 1997 to introduce audiology services and identify auditory disorders in the country. Some decades before the MAP, another program reported extremely high incidence rates of otitis media in 1000 primary school students in the capital city of Maputo. This paper presents the MAP results from mass hearing screenings conducted over a two year period on a cohort group of 2685 students ranging in age from 3-18 years at a preschool and primary school in Chicuque and Maxixe, Mozambique. This current study showed a prevalence of 5% of the total 2685 students across ages with varying degrees of hearing loss resulting from multiple etiologies. External auditory canal obstruction was the greatest otoscopic abnormality (regardless of age), followed by severely limited tympanic membrane mobility (i.e. flat tympanogram) in the absence of EAC obstruction in those students identified with hearing loss. Of the 145 student identified with hearing loss, there were 27 found to have active drainage. Some of the benefits of conducting mass hearing screening in this population are discussed.