State-specific prevalence of disability among adults--11 states and the District of Columbia, 1998.

Disability is a large public health problem in the United States (1), affecting an estimated 54 million persons who report disabling conditions (2). One of the national health goals for 2010 is to eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population, including among persons with disabilities (3). Although the development and implementation of public health policy and services relating to disability would be aided by public health surveillance (4), the lack of a brief case definition of disability limits efforts to obtain state-level prevalence to define the magnitude of disability. To assess state-level prevalence based on uniform criteria, CDC analyzed data from the Disability Module of the 1998 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). This report summarizes the results of the analyses, which indicated an overall prevalence consistent with national surveys and demonstrated wide variation in disability prevalence in states.