Back in the 90’s Mike Huckabee said that patients with AIDS should be isolated and effectively quarantined. He explains that back then he was not sure of the mode of transmission and things have changed now, but he feels his statements were justifiable at the time.
I find this somewhat implausible. Lest we forget, the AIDS epidemic (in the US)started in the early 80’s. The initial hysteria and fear had certainly calmed down considerably by the time Huckabee made this statement. Also by then the medical guidelines for treatment and preventing transmission were well established.
No, they shouldn’t.
Of course not.
Huckabee made his comments in 1992. After digging through PubMed for awhile, it seems like the scientific community had pretty much suspected a viral vector as the pathogen as early as 1984. I don’t expect my president to be completely up to date on medical research, but I expect him or her to be faster than that.
I think there were some other motivating factors guiding Huckabee’s comments. :dubious:
You’re asking should they be or was Huckabee right to say it?
Do you mean, should they be segregated now, or are you suggesting that, when Huckabee made his comment, that it was a good idea based on the knowledge available at the time?
Wouldn’t it be more economical to shoot them?
The answer is no for either now or back when Huckabee said it. It was already common knowledge in 1992 that the virus could not be casually transmitted, although I do remember a few right wing media pundits still engaging in som we “don’t know for SURE,” and “what if teh scientsist are WRONG?” kind of rhetoric.
Considering that lepers got a nice plot of land in Hawaii, they might start asking for it. 
However, everybody who paid attention to the facts was.
Huckster was (again) on the wrong side of the battle referenced in this site’s headline banner.
Yes far right. Pandering away.
I was living with a person who was at high risk for having HIV back in the mid- to late-80s. It was reasonably well-established by then, though not conclusively demonstrated, that there wasn’t casual transmission. If you need me to dig out my dissertation for some cites, I’ll do it, but I think this was really well known well before H’s statement (which didn’t stop the “let’s tattoo them and put them in camps” crowd). The denial of drug use/heterosexual transmission/MSM that led to “Haitian” as a category back then was somewhat confounding, but it was clear by the late 80’s that you didn’t get it without blood-blood contact.
I’d also presume that a president or public official would be more informed than Huckabee was, too. Was he even in public office then?
Having said that, I think the relevant question is: Was there ever a time when it would have been the right thing to do. Let’s forget about 1992 (I think we can all agree the answer is “no” for that time), and ask the more difficult question. I honestly don’t know what the answer is, and I don’t know what precedent there is for quarantining people. I suspect there must be some time when it makes sense, but there obviously needs to be some boundaries on how that is done.
I think quarantine can be a prudent move in some situations (I say this having been quarantined myself), but I think there needs to be evidence that casual transmission of a given pathogen is possible. In the case of HIV, while in early years there was a lot that was not known, it was clear that it was affecting small numbers of people and that many of them had potential vectors for vulnerability (e.g., a fair amount of substance use) or potential routes of transmission (e.g., groups of sex- or drug-affiliated cohorts). That’s a very differnt scene than, say, TB, which is spread through coughing.
I was an active member of NYC’s gay community, during the early years of the epidemic. Almost everyone I knew back then eventually got sick and died. Yet I don’t recall a time when ***we ***had any real fears of casual contact. We were just too busy taking care of the sick and going to protests and funerals. Even long before we knew it was viral, it was still exclusively the homophobic right that talked about tattoos and camps. And yes, they actually wanted to tattoo every gay man’s ass with a warning.
I was in high school in the early 90’s. I knew by then that AIDS was caused by a virus that was not transmitted through casual contact. If a fairly sheltered high school student could know that then, he could have too.
No, AIDS patients shouldn’t be segregated.
However, as to the actual comments Huckabee made, while ignorant, I can’t really find much fault with the guy in this regard. He made an ignorant comment in 1992 and opposed funding into AIDS/HIV research, a bad comment backed up by a bad policy.
But he now supports expanding funding for fighting AIDS/HIV. Whatever he thinks about gays or homosexuality just isn’t relevant to me. AIDS/HIV is a public policy problem and we do need to devote money to either trying to find a cure, a vaccine, or trying to decrease its likelihood of being transmitted. He’s in the right on that issue now, as he supports funding.
My opinion is it doesn’t matter. It was fifteen years ago, and he’s changed his mind since then. I’d be worried if he still thought they should be segregated, but I give him credit for realizing he was wrong, even if it was later than it probably should have been.
If the writers (and viewers) of a Canadian teen series already knew how it was transmitted, he really had no excuse. Now, have any advancements been made in the submitting wives front since 1998?