On January 1, 2004 Dr. Desai started his three-week tour to India for continuation of “Project Deaf India.” His first stop was Singapore for three days. He observed the project on, “Early Detection of Hearing and Intervention.” This project is supported by the government of Singapore, it consists of testing every newborn baby at all hospitals and nursing homes to detect hearing loss. Even though the babies are kept for only two days in most of the hospitals all of them receive testing first by the OAE method and if they are detected to have hearing loss then they are confirmed with AABR technique. In turn this is fed to the database for the whole city. He was very impressed by the several coordinators of this project whom worked very hard and are devoted to the project.
Dr. Desai then went to Chennai, India where he was invited as a guest speaker to All India Pediatric Conference. He presented his forty- minute presentation with power point, this was well received because of ten-minute interaction with the audience. After spending four days in Chennai he proceeded to Bangalore. He gave two lectures to local hospitals on the same subject and then went to the city of Mysore where he has been working on the Rotary International Grants for the past five years. The reception by the Mysore Rotarians is always exceptional. He gave two more lectures on the above subject at two medical schools. He also prepared a final matching grant application on “Early Detection of Hearing and Intervention.” This application is between Rotary Club Mysore and the Rotary Club of Newport-Balboa. The application is being sent to Rotary International with the hope of successfully achieving a grant of approximately. $60,000.
Dr. Desai then proceeded to Mumbai where he met his relatives and also discussed the future of his various projects with the Rotarians. He then visited Pune where there is the Serum Institute of Pune. This institute supplies various kinds of vaccines to about 130 countries. There he met the son of the CEO as well as several members of the staff to discuss the possibility of the new project on “Vaccination with Rubella” for all teenage girls to prevent the rubella syndrome, which is greatly responsible for many congenital diseases such as deafness, blindness, heart disease, etc. In the city of Pune there are approximately 10,000 teenage girls and if all receive vaccination with rubella their offspring’s will be free of the above diseases particularly deafness. Dr. Desai returned to California after a 3 weeks successful tour.
He presented his resent documentary on “Prevention of Deafness in India” at all his lectures. He is looking forward for successful achieving the above goals of detection of early deafness and vaccination with rubella in the near future