Thus the English reading level of the average deaf adult at the completion of formal education is usually placed somewhere between the third and the eighth grade. With all the ways we have of transmitting information, they're just not receiving it. Some deaf AIDS activists can testify personally to the price of the gap. It was very technical, complicated and fuzzy information to me, so I just pitched it. The language problem is only the first barrier to understanding.
Many deaf people have only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy, disease and medicine.
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. There are many like James, who know they are sick but continue having unprotected sex, not out of callousness but confusion. 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.