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Library's IM Service 
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Deaf-blind in the U.S. This is an especially difficult number to find. As noted in the Introduction to Deaf Statistics, the number of deaf persons in the U.S. is difficult to estimate, beginning with the very definition of "deaf" that can vary widely from one person or agency to another. This difficulty gets compounded when you add the similar vagaries of defining "blindness", and then combining both conditions in the same individual.
According to one source (Turkington and Sussman, 2000), "…a national study commissioned by the Department of Education in 1980 estimated between 42,000 and more than 700,000, depending on how deaf-blindness is defined." That's a range of nearly 1 to 17 between low and high estimates!
Fortunately, we can determine a generally more-useful number from data supplied by a reasonably authoritative source. The National Information Clearinghouse on Children Who Are Deaf-Blind has a Web site called DB-LINK. One page on this site is Barbara Miles' paper "Overview on Deaf-Blindness" (http://www.tr.wou.edu/dblink/overview.htm, revised July 2000), which cites these figures:
"As far as it has been possible to count them, there are over 11,000 children (ages birth to 22 years) in the United States who have been classified as deaf-blind (Baldwin, 1997 [sic, actually 1994]). It has been estimated that the adult deaf-blind population numbers 35-40,000 (Watson, 1993)."
The Baldwin citation is to the 1994 Annual Deaf-Blind Census (of children only). However, the results of the 1998 Annual Deaf-Blind Census at The National Technical Assistance Consortium for Children and Young Adults Who Are Deaf-Blind (http://www.tr.wou.edu/ntac/census/mctp.htm) give a 1998 national total of 9,929 deaf-blind children from birth through age 21, compared to 1994's "over 11,000".
Adding the 1998 census figures for children plus Watson's 1993 adult figures gives us roughly 45,000 to 50,000 deaf-blind individuals in the U.S.
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