When Congress first passed the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, 43 million Americans were cited as having disabilities. However, the numbers first cited by Congress were based mostly on data from the 1979 National Health Information Survey, and didn’t even include additional millions of people who had significant limitation in activity due to chronic diseases such as arthritis. And by the time Congress had released their first report, most of the data was already 11 years old. Other links on the Disability Links Menu will take you to a variety of recent disability studies completed over the last few years.
