MEDIA RELEASE— February 27, 2026 — R0024
This World Hearing Day, Hillary Ganek and her students are teaming up with the Cochlear Implant International Community of Advocacy (CIICA) to support families of children with hearing loss in developing countries.
Organized by the World Health Organization, the global advocacy campaign is this year focused on the need to improve hearing care for all children, which is also a research priority for the Brock University Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics.
Ganek’s project with CIICA, a European non-profit organization, involves families from low- and middle-income countries around the world whose children have benefitted from cochlear implants. These permanent electronic devices digitize sounds and transmit them to the cochlear nerve to help treat hearing loss.
By collecting and sharing stories from families who have accessed cochlear implants for their child along with the support services that enable the surgery and ensuing therapy, Ganek and CIICA hope to identify areas that require additional advocacy in different countries.
“In the past 30 years, there have been significant developments in the way that we treat hearing loss in high-income countries,” says Ganek, a speech-language pathologist and certified auditory-verbal therapist. “We are able to identify children with hearing loss at birth, which means we can capitalize on the fact that infants are learning to listen and talk from the very moment that they are born, and even before, as they’re listening in the womb.”
Because the brain has evolved to learn language from birth, early diagnosis of hearing loss is critical to language acquisition and improved outcomes for children, she says.
“If we diagnose a child with hearing loss, we can get them fitted with hearing technology, whether that’s a hearing aid, cochlear implant or another device, by the time they’re six months old,” says Ganek. “Then we get them into speech therapy or sign language class so that they are learning to communicate when their brain is meant to be learning to communicate.”
Research shows the results of this early treatment are dramatic, with many children acquiring age-appropriate language skills by the time they start school.
However, Ganek says with 80 per cent of people with hearing losses living in low-resource settings, children can miss out on treatment during this critical developmental window.
“Children in different health-care systems may have hearing loss because they have less access to vaccination programs and medications that fight infectious diseases. They are also more likely to have been given ototoxic prescription drugs, which can damage hearing as a side effect,” she says.
When those risk factors are compounded by limited access to hearing screenings, technologies to treat hearing loss and professional speech-language pathologists to provide interventions, the inequity becomes even greater.
“This work with CIICA is to draw attention to the few families who have been able to get their children this technology and find support,” says Ganek. “We can then look at what we need to do in the hearing-loss community to ensure that the path to treatment and support is less difficult and available to more families.”
With the support of a student team, Ganek will prepare the families’ stories to share on the CIICA website along with a map showing where the families live. The families’ journeys will be available online Tuesday, March 3, when World Hearing Day is observed.
Once the awareness elements are in place, the team will then analyze the personal narratives to identify common themes and experiences, which can inform the development of a policy paper to help guide CIICA and other advocates.
For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:
*Sarah Ackles, Communications Specialist, Brock University [email protected] or 289-241-5483
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