Word: deaf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most, that is, unless they were deaf. Today, 13 years into the epidemic, the average deaf person may -- just recently -- have learned AIDS exists. But, say activists in the field, most of America's deaf adults and teenagers still do not know what "HIV positive" means, that it can be contracted from someone who shows no symptoms, how to have safe sex or avoid infection through needles, or that women can catch...
...should a deaf person be more vulnerable to the 20th century plague than a blind person or, for that matter, the average American? The answer, say deaf activists, is that their peers do not read English. The first language of more than half of America's deaf, whose number is variously estimated at between 250,000 and 2 million, is American Sign Language (ASL). That elegant mode of communication, a combination of signs and gestures, is not based on English. Thus the English reading level of the average deaf adult at the completion of formal education is usually placed somewhere...
...Some deaf AIDS activists can testify personally to the price of the gap. "I was very puzzled about AIDS," says Harry Woosley Jr., an AIDS/HIV educator in Baltimore, Maryland, who visits churches, apartment complexes and bars with a large deaf population, trying to get the word out. "I remember reading about it ((in the mid-'80s)). It was very technical, complicated and fuzzy information to me, so I just pitched it." The "complicated information" was newspaper and magazine articles; Woosley was found to be HIV positive a few years later...
...language problem is only the first barrier to understanding. Many deaf people have only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy, disease and medicine. African-American deaf people, who employ their own dialect of ASL, are yet more isolated from mainstream information -- and so more endangered. Residential schools for the deaf tend to be more puritanical than those for the hearing, and sex education is less comprehensive. Some social scientists also believe that needle drug use is higher because of alienation and loneliness. Even excluding such theories, says Susan Karchmer of Gallaudet University, the world's only four-year liberal-arts school...
...Once a deaf person contracts AIDS, its horrors are magnified. John Canady, the scion of a multigeneration deaf family in California, signed so exquisitely that he served as a model for an ASL textbook. His eloquence meant ) less than nothing when he ended up in a San Diego hospital with an AIDS- related crisis. Not only did his attendants fail to provide an interpreter, they also tied his hands to a gurney. Trapped for hours in the classic nightmare of I-want-to-scream-but-some one-has-his-hand-over-my-mouth, Canady died shortly after friends found...