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Saturday 25 October 2014

Disability

Margaret Corbin, the first woman to fight in the Revolutionary War was injured during the fighting. She became the first woman to be awarded a disability pension by the American Congress.

Carl Unthan (1848-1929) was a Prussian violinist who was born without arms. At the age of 10, he taught himself to play the violin by strapping it to a stool. If he broke a string, he replaced it and tuned it using only his toes. Unthan was also a skilled marksman, operating a rifle with his feet.

From the 1860s until the 1970s, several American cities had ugly laws making it illegal for persons with "unsightly or disgusting" disabilities to appear in public.

Blind, quadriplegic veteran Walter Harris Callow invented the wheelchair-accessible bus in 1947—his first and only ride was upon his death.

Mike Millard, one of the most legendary concert bootleggers in the 1970s and 1980s, would pretend to be handicapped in order to sneak in his recording equipment on his wheelchair. His recordings are considered some of the best, even to this day.

American actor Christopher Reeve, best known for role as Superman, was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition, leaving him quadriplegic on May 27, 1995. Reeve became a prominent advocate for spinal cord research and worked tirelessly to raise awareness and support for people with disabilities until his death in 2004. His advocacy efforts had a significant impact on the advancement of spinal cord injury research and treatment.

The Spanish Paralympic basketball team in 2000, had to hand back their medals as ten of them didn’t have a disability.


The Jagadguru Rambhadracharya Handicapped University, the only university exclusively for the disabled in the world, was founded in Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India in 2001.

The China Disability Sports Training Center opened on June 28, 2007, the first facility in China entirely devoted to disability sports training. At 2,564,340 sq ft, it is the largest of its kind in the world.

The Chinese women's national wheelchair basketball team at the China Disabilities Training Center www.chinadaily.com.

Disney parks once allowed people with wheelchairs to cut in line with six guest. This led to the formation of a black-market by some rich Manhattan mums who hired disabled tour guides to pose as family members so they and their kids could jump to the front. These guides sometimes charged up to hundreds of dollars per hour. Because of this rampant abuse of the rule Disney was forced to abandon its policy in 2013.

International Day of Persons with Disabilities is an international observance promoted by the United Nations each year on December 3 since 1992. It aims to promote the rights and well-being of persons with disabilities in all spheres of society and development, and to increase awareness of the situation of persons with disabilities in every aspect of political, social, economic and cultural life.

About 15% of the world's population lives with some form of disability, of whom 2-4% experience significant difficulties in functioning. 

Of the one billion population of persons with disabilities, 80% live in developing countries.

An estimated 46% of older people aged 60 years and over are people with disabilities.

An estimated 48.9 million people, or 19.4% of the non-institutionalized civilians, have a disability in the United States. An estimated 24.1 million people have a severe disability.

Disabled people in the UK can get a universal key which works with  the 9,000 plus disabled toilets around the whole of the country.

Source UN

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