Problems of health: Some illnesses, as the measles or the meningite can be in the origin of a mental deficiency, over all if will not be taken all the necessary cares of health. Me the extreme nutrition or the exposition the poisons as mercury or the lead can also originate serious problems for the mental development of the children. None of these causes produces, by itself, an intellectual deficiency. However, they constitute risks, more serious some other little, that it agrees to prevent as much as possible. For example, an illness as the meningite does not provoke an intellectual delay forcibly; the extreme alcohol consumption during the pregnancy also not; however, they constitute serious too much risks so that not if it looks to all the cares of health necessary to fight the illness, or so that if it does not prevent the alcohol consumption during the pregnancy. The intellectual deficiency is not an illness. It cannot be contracted I infect from it with other people, nor the conviviality with a deficient intellectual provokes any damage in people who are not. The cognitivo delay is not an insanity (psychic suffering), as the depression, schizophrenia, for example.
Not being an illness, also it does not make sensible to look or to wait one cure for the intellectual deficiency. The great majority of the children with intellectual deficiency obtains to learn to make many useful things for its family, school, society and all they learn something for its utility and well-being of the community where they live. For this they need, in rule, of more time and supports to cheat success. The intellectual deficiency or cognitivo delay, as Pessotti (1982) is diagnosised, observing two things: The capacity of the brain of the person to learn, to think, to decide problems, to find a direction of the world, an intelligence of the world encircles that them (to this capacity calls cognitivo functioning or intellectual functioning).
