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December 11, 2007
Ryan White’s Mother Wants a Word With Huckabee
The mother of Ryan White—a teenager who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and died of AIDS-related illness in 1990—would like to meet with Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee to discuss his statements that people living with HIV/AIDS should be quarantined from the rest of society, the Associated Press reports (forbes.com/Associated Press, 12/11).
“It’s so alarming to me,” Jeanne White-Ginder told the AP in response to Huckabee’s comments, which he originally made in a 1992 interview and were recently reprinted. “We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word.”
According to the AP, the Human Rights Campaign and the AIDS institute sent a letter on Tuesday, December 11, to Huckabee’s offices, urging him to meet with White-Ginder.
Revisiting his 1992 comments, Huckabee told Fox News Sunday on December 9 that his intention was not to “lock people up.” He added, however, that he stands by what he said, claiming the statements were a reasonable reaction to the epidemic at the time.
“I don’t run from it, I don’t recant it,” he says of his original declaration that “we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.”
Additionally, advocacy group AIDS Action has called on Huckabee to follow HIV/AIDS science. In a statement issued today, December 11, AIDS Action called on every presidential candidate from every party, to commit to creating an evidence-based national HIV/AIDS strategy.
