PART 1: By Stavros Hatzopoulos Ph.D. and Katia de Almeida Ph.D.

         The 2nd international conference on newborn hearing screening ( NHS) was organized in Como Italy, by Drs Ferdinando Grandori and Deborah Hayes. It attracted more than 500 participants, a significantly larger number that the number of participants of the first NHS meeting in Milano in 2000.

        As technology advances, the number of arguments associated with NHS is also increasing, and for this reason the organizers included sessions on genetics, cochlear implants and amplification and middle ear measurements. In contrary to the NHS-2000 meeting there were more oral presentations and less posters. This provided the opportunity for all of us to share the state of the art developments in the NHS-arena of topics. Both poster sessions were verysuccessfull and it was a common observation that interesting discussions were evolved between the data-presenters and the conference participants.

        Considering the focused nature of the meeting, the quality of thepresentationss was good and in most cases higher than the American Association of Audiology lecture /presentations. One drawback that we noticed was the information presented during the sessions on European research in OAEs and Technical Updates. Except the very interesting data reported by Dr. Peter Zoth , the rest of the presentations simply covered material which is well known. This is kind of disappointing considering the 26 years of OAE research and the 2000 papers on the topic of OAEs.

        The middle ear measurements section, proved to be one of the most fascinating sessions of the conference and we are grateful to the organizers which included these topics in the program, because it is common knowledge that middle ear status and mechanics influence heavily the NHS results. For this reason we are in contact with Dr. Keefe who might contribute a couple of white papers to the Portal of the material presented in Como.