I am glad to see that Virginia has a system in place for infant hearing tests. I ended up here searching for another regulatory activity but I briefly reviewed the legislation and wanted to comment. It seems adequate and I highly recommend keeping it or something similar on the books.

We found out during an infant screening that one of my sons was deaf in one ear despite an uneventful pregnancy and no family history of such. Unfortunately after investigating, there is not much we can do for the deaf ear but knowing that one ear is compromised has allowed us to protect the other ear as best we can. Without the newborn screening we might not have known about the deafness until he started school or later . Had we not know about the deafness, we might have not been as aggressive during normal childhood ear infections (with the current trend towards waiting it out and not treating an ear infection with antibiotics) and could have totally deafened him.