WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee refused to retract a statement he made in 1992 calling for the isolation of AIDS patients.
Surging in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee campaigns Saturday in Asheville, North Carolina.
Huckabee said steps should be taken to "isolate the carriers of this plague" during his failed run for a U.S. Senate seat from Arkansas 15 years ago.
He said he probably would not make the same statement today because of what is known about how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is transmitted.
"I had simply made the point -- and I still believe this today -- that in the late '80s and early '90s, when we didn't know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols that we would have acted," Huckabee told Fox News on Sunday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 1985 that AIDS was not transmitted by casual contact. But Huckabee said at the time, "there were other concerns being voiced by public health officials."
He disputed the characterization that he was calling for individuals infected with HIV to be quarantined.
"Now, would I say things a little differently in 2007? Probably so," Huckabee told Fox News. "But I'm not going to recant or retract from the statement that I did make because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have HIV/AIDS."
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http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/10/huckabee.aids/
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