Transportation and Public Works, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the National Library, and the Catholic University. The National Civil Service Office, which is in charge of monitoring the enforcement of part of Law 16095, also uses this disability definition.
Although the definition is widely used, not all organizations have adopted it. According to the Ministry of Public Health, for example, no classification of disability is officially used. The School of Medicine of the Republic's University (UDELAR) uses the definitions of the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (ICIDH) and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF).5
The definition of disability used by the Division of Traffic and Transportation of
the Municipal Government of Montevideo, Uruguay's capital city, is taken from
Law 13102 and Order 22515.6 They state that "a crippled person is any individual
having some major permanent or temporary impairment, which may extend for a
period of about 5 years, affecting limb functionality."7
The last national census of Uruguay, completed in 1996, recorded a population of 3,163,763 with more than half the country's population concentrated in Montevideo, the capital city.8 The National Institute of Statistics (INE) does not yet possess official statistics on people with disabilities although a survey intended to identify the number of persons with disabilities was recently conducted. In conjunction with the National Honorary Disability Committee (CNHD), the INE designed the 2003-2004 National Disability Survey. The survey is still in progress and will be completed in September 2004. The data is collected through a module added to the Continuous Household Survey.9
Although there are no official numbers, different organizations possess their own estimates of the number of people with disabilities. The CNHD estimates that 10% of the total population is comprised of people with some kind of disability.10
The Inter-American Research and Documentation Center on Vocational Training of the International Labor Organization (CINTERFOR/ILO-Uruguay), on the other hand, reports that the rate of people with disabilities aged 16 to 40 is 15.5% of the total population.11 The PAHO office in Uruguay states that the actual rate of people with disabilities might amount to 25%.12
5. World Health Organization (WHO), ICF, 22 May 2001, www.who.int/classification/icf/whares/ wha-en.pdf; http://cm.coe.int/ta/rec/1992/92r6.htm.
6. Felipe Martín.
7. Law 13102.
8. National Institute of Statistics and Census, Census of 1996, http://www.ine.gub.uy/.
9. Orual Andina (Managing Director, INE), interviewer, Montevideo, Uruguay, 14 August 2003.
10. Professor Ana Stasiuc (President of the National Honorary Disability Committee), interviewed 14 Oct 2003.
11. Project "RLA/94 /MO5/SPA/," "Apoyo a la integración normalizada de las personas con discapacidad en las instituciones de formación profesional en latinoamérica" [Support for the Normalized Integration of People with Disabilities at Vocational Training Institutes in Latin America], information provided by Pedro Weinberg (Director, CINTERFOR) and Fernando Vargas (Conslutan, CINTERFOR), Montevideo, Uruguay 12 September 2003.
12. Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Uruguay.