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A state lawmaker who has drawn criticism after asking about the legality of quarantining people with HIV has said her comments were misunderstood and intended to be “provocative” and “rhetorical” in a broader conversation about curtailing the virus. Georgia State Rep. Betty Price (R) made the statement Tuesday, at a study committee meeting on barriers to adequate health care. Committee members had been discussing, she later said, why Georgia ranks second in the nation when it came to new HIV cases. (Hui and Wang, 10/22)

“What are we legally able to do, and I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” Price says. “Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition. So we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise, or are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread?” (Conradis, 10/22)

Price added, “It seems to me it’s almost frightening, the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers. Well they are carriers, with the potential to spread, whereas in the past they died more readily and then at that point they are not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they are not in treatment.” (Hart, 10/21)

On Saturday, Price stressed she has worked in public health for years and had made the comments during a discussion of why there were so many people in Georgia who were not getting treatment and posed a risk of spreading the virus to others. Georgia has one of the highest rates of new HIV infections in the country. (10/22)

Georgia was home to nearly 50,000 people diagnosed with HIV in 2014, and had the second highest rate of new diagnoses among all states the following year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wortley’s presentation noted that gay black men in metro Atlanta have by far the highest rates of HIV diagnoses in Georgia. AIDS researchers have compared the severity of Atlanta’s epidemic to that of some nations in Africa. (Blau, 10/20)