Infections & Immune — VA Disability Ratings

How Infections & Immune conditions are rated

This section covers infectious diseases, immune disorders and nutritional deficiencies — tuberculosis, HIV-related illness, hepatitis, Lyme disease, brucellosis, parasitic and tropical diseases, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Diagnostic codes run 6300 through 6354.

The structural idea to understand here is the split between active disease and residuals. An active infection generally carries a 100% evaluation while it is active. Once it resolves, the infection itself typically drops to 0% and whatever damage it left behind is rated under the body system it actually affects — lungs, kidneys, nerves, and so on. If you were rated during an active infection and later feel the residuals are undervalued, the question is usually not the infectious-disease code but whether every residual has been separately identified and rated.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, DC 6354, works differently from most codes in this section. It is rated on how much your routine daily activity is restricted and how many weeks per year you are incapacitated — 10% for one to two weeks of incapacitation a year or symptoms controlled by continuous medication, rising through 20%, 40% and 60%, up to 100% where debilitating symptoms are nearly constant and restrict routine activities almost completely. Contemporaneous records of incapacitating episodes are what make this code work; memory after the fact rarely does.

HIV-related illness is DC 6351 and runs from 0% when asymptomatic to 100%. Several conditions in this group — visceral leishmaniasis, leprosy, miliary tuberculosis, non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection and hyperinfection syndrome among them — carry a mandatory VA examination roughly six months after treatment ends.