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Cite as: 524 U. S. 624 (1998)

633

Opinion of the Court

In issuing these regulations, HEW decided against including
a list of disorders constituting physical or mental impair-
ments, out of concern that any speciﬁc enumeration might
not be comprehensive.
42 Fed. Reg. 22685 (1977), reprinted
in 45 CFR pt. 84, App. A, p. 334 (1997). The commentary
accompanying the regulations, however, contains a repre-
sentative list of disorders and conditions constituting physi-
cal impairments, including “such diseases and conditions as
orthopedic, visual, speech, and hearing impairments, cere-
bral palsy, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis,
cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emo-
Ibid.
tional illness, and . . . drug addiction and alcoholism.”
In 1980, the President transferred responsibility for the
implementation and enforcement of § 504 to the Attorney
General. See, e. g., Exec. Order No. 12250, 3 CFR 298
(1981). The regulations issued by the Justice Department,
which remain in force to this day, adopted verbatim the
HEW deﬁnition of physical impairment quoted above.
28
CFR § 41.31(b)(1) (1997).
In addition, the representative list
of diseases and conditions originally relegated to the com-
mentary accompanying the HEW regulations were incorpo-
rated into the text of the regulations.

Ibid.

HIV infection is not included in the list of speciﬁc disor-
ders constituting physical impairments, in part because HIV
was not identiﬁed as the cause of AIDS until 1983. See
Barre´ -Sinoussi et al., Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovi-
rus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deﬁciency
Syndrome (AIDS), 220 Science 868 (1983); Gallo et al., Fre-
quent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses
(HTLV–III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS,
224 Science 500 (1984); Levy et al., Isolation of Lymphocyto-
pathic Retroviruses from San Francisco Patients with AIDS,
225 Science 840 (1984). HIV infection does fall well within
the general deﬁnition set forth by the regulations, however.
The disease follows a predictable and, as of today, an unal-
terable course. Once a person is infected with HIV, the