Some Demographic Features of the Disabled Population in Pakistan

Abstract

Although disability has been the area of concern in the domain of such disciplines as social welfare and public health, the serious concern on the demography of disability as an important research subject has emerged only recently. In the less developed countries where most of the world popUlation lives, the rapid decline in mortality with little reduction in fertility, under the conditions of underdevelopment, nutritional deficiencies, insufficient coverage for health, inadequate sanitation and safe water facilities, has been contributing to the increasing number of disabled persons. This is because the availability of modern medicine, even to an inadequate extent, has contributed to the reduction in mortality, but many of those who survive become permanently disabled. Apart from the differences in data collection systems in different countries and the problems associated with such approaches, the variations in prevalence of disability are partly attributed to such factors as differential chronic and infectious disease patterns; differential life expectancy; the age structure of populations and population composition; differential nutritional status; differential rates of exposure to environmental, occupational and traffic hazards; and variations in public health practice [United Nations. (1990)]. In developed countries where the increase in life expectancy had started to occur earlier than the developing countries, the decline in fertility led to the growing proportions of the elderly in their population. As the proportion of the elderly popUlation in the total population gets larger the proportion of the disabled become conspicuous. This is because in both developed and deVeloping countries the age structure of the disabled popUlation is predominantly elderly in comparison to the overall population age structure. It has been observed that in such developed countries where the ageing process has gone furthest, the number of disabled persons have increased rapidly. [Okoliski (1986).]