It takes only a few minutes in the company of Pat Dugdale to realise that she has a mischievous sense of fun. It’s almost as if she enjoys shocking people and then watching their reaction.
Ask her where she met her husband and she chuckles: “In a pub” — and I’d had a few drinks at the time!”
It’s not the sort of reply you expect from a research worker at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine who is heavily into studies of hearing impairment in the third world.
But then she is not a run-of-the-mill sort of person. She is totally deaf herself — the result of meningitis at the age of nine — yet graduated with a BA Honours in English from Manchester University, has been a housewife and mother of three children, and has coped with emigrating to New Zealand and establishing a home there.
She has returned to this country to take part in a three-year project at the School of Tropical Medicine. Its aim is to establish the extent of hearing disability in developing countries and particularly how far children under 12 are affected.
The intention then is to design tests which can easily and cheaply be applied on a large scale to detect and measure the disability in various countries, and to suggest what the health authorities there can do to prevent deafness and to help victims lead as normal life as possible.
It is a major research programme which could benefit millions because hearing impairment is probably the biggest disability in the Third World after mental retardation.
While in New Zealand, Pat Dugdale worked with Professor Kenneth Newell, who was chairman of a committee set up to advise on a national policy for providing for the needs of the deaf or partially deaf.
When she heard that Professor Newell who is now head of the department of International Community Health at the School of Tropical Medicine, was launching the Liverpool project, she at once volunteered to return to England.
She feels that those who are not deaf cannot appreciate what it is like to be unable to communicate adequately in a world in which communication has become so vital.
“Most people with a disability are easily identified. The blind, for instance, quite often carry a stick. Deafness is the invisible handicap and even when people are aware of deafness, they are often intolerant and impatient,” she says.
“If people would only understand the problems faced by the deaf in communicating, and speak more slowly and distinctly so lip reading is easier. It would help enormously.
“Instead, people don’t seem to know how to cope. There is a fear of the deaf which causes the wrong reactions and makes the situation even more difficult for the deaf person.”
She sees prevention as the most important aim and, although deaf herself for about 40 years, thinks she was lucky that it happened after she had learned to speak. The greatest handicap is suffered by those who are born deaf.
She says she is being helped greatly in her work at the school by the understanding and support she receives from the staff and, particularly, the help of her fellow research assistant, Fiona Gell, who acts as her “ears” in taking telephone calls.
The high incidence of deafness in developing countries is largely due to poverty. Otitis media, inflammation of the middle ear, is a common condition and is due to infection in the ear which, in turn, may arise from the living conditions. Rubella (German measles) during pregnancy, whooping cough, and meningitis and other infections can also leave children deaf. The answer to such infections could be mass immunisation.
These are all aspects which will be considered as part of the Liverpool project.
Pat Dugdale’s husband, who worked for Unilever in New Zealand, has now joined her and they are living in Bebington. Mr. Dugdale is with the Unilever Research Division at Port Sunlight.
They have left two daughters in New Zealand, both in their twenties, and have a son who has been in Britain for five years.
“We would like to return to New Zealand when my work here is done,” she says simply, as though uprooting your home and going half way round the world and back was just an everyday event.
But Pat Dugdale takes most things in her stride, including her own deafness. She says, “I’m lucky to be alive. After all, when I had meningitis it was usually fatal.”
