September/October - 1 9 9 8
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Chad Ludwig |
HIV-AIDS. It is still here. It is still incurable. And it's still wreaking havoc with many people's lives. Just ask Chad Ludwig. Ludwig is senior supervisor for the national TTY AIDS Hotline.
Every day people call on TTY, ask for emergency help, and tell Ludwig their stories. There was the young woman who had sexual relations with a man who was not her husband-and wanted to know about protection. There was the older man whose wife had died and who wanted to date women again. And there was the teen who called to learn about AIDS testing and threatened to kill herself if she found she had HIV.
Ludwig, like all of the TTY callers, is deaf. He was born in California and graduated last year from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf/ Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, New York, with a BA degree in social work. When he was still in college, he researched his family to do a genogram for class and learned he had a second cousin who had died from AIDS.
"I never met the cousin," said Ludwig. "Still his death upset me. It gave me the goal of working with deaf and hard of hearing individuals nationwide in the battle against AIDS."
Last year the TTY Hotline received an average of nine calls a week. The number of calls has declined since the service opened in 1988, Ludwig said. He believes the decline is due partly to the new drugs that enable people with HIV-AIDS to live longer and partly to the inaccurate belief that HIV-AIDS can be cured.
"We need to improve the level of information in the deaf community," he said. "Teenagers are still getting HIV-AIDS at an alarming rate-and there is still no cure."
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TTY AIDS Hotline The TTY AIDS Hotline is run by the Center for Disease Control, the national center for the fight against HIV-AIDS. It is in its 10th year of operation. The center provides free information, booklets, and referrals-and its services are always confidential.
Call: 1-800-AIDS-TTY |  |
Last modified November 10, 1998
Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved
Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center
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