Betty Price, an anesthesiologist for the past two decades, is the wife of ex- U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. secretary, Tom Price, who is also a doctor.
Price, whose district includes parts of Atlanta’s northern suburbs, asked Dr. Pascale Wortley, the head of the Georgia Department of Public Health’s HIV epidemiology section on Tuesday during a legislative committee meeting, according to The Guardian.
In a video of the meeting called to study the barriers to adequate healthcare in Georgia, Price is seen asking Dr. Wortley, “What are we legally able to do? I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it.” However, she didn’t stop there but went on to explain, saying: “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,” she said. “Are there any methods, legally, that we could do that would curtail the spread?”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that 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.”
AIDS in the United States
According to the CDC, an estimated 1.1 million people in the United States were living with HIV at the end of 2014, the most recent year for which this information is available. Of those people, about 15 percent, or 1 in 7, did not know they were infected.
The risk of getting AIDS is greater for people living in the South than in other regions of the country. The lifetime risk of HIV diagnosis is highest in the District of Columbia, followed by Maryland, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, and Alabama, based on statistics for 2015.
Georgia ranked fifth highest in the country for the number of adults and adolescents living with HIV, according to the state’s Department of Public Health website.
Among the 18 Public Health Districts in Georgia, Fulton and DeKalb had the highest numbers and rates of persons living with an HIV infection, while nearly two-thirds of persons living with HIV infection in 2015 resided in the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area.
