Letter to the Editor

Abstract

In their recent Pediatrics artide entitled "Universal Screening for Infant Hearing Impairment: Not Simple, Not Risk-Free, Not Necessarily Beneficial, and Not Presently Justified," Bess and Paradise comment on the performance of the auditory brainstem response (ABR) as a screening procedure, and quote an estimate from the 1993 National Institutes of Health Conference Statement on Early Identification of Hearing Impairment that "for every child with significant hearing impairment, more than 100 babies are referred." Bess and Paradise then comment that "the same concerns necessarily apply to a recently devised, automated ABR instrument," and reference my Handbook of Auditory Evoked Responses in support of their contention.