H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. long Before ‘Patient Zero’
In the tortuous mythology of the AIDS epidemic, one legend never seems to die: Patient Zero, a.k.a. Gaétan Dugas, a globe-trotting, sexually insatiable French Canadian flight attendant who supposedly picked up H.I.V. in Haiti or Africa and spread it to dozens, even hundreds, of men before his death in 1984.
But now a new genomic study has shown that HIV traveled to New York City from the Caribbean in 1971, clearing the name of the man mistakenly dubbed “Patient Zero.”
Paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19827.html
Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/health/hiv-patient-zero-genetic-analysis.html?_r=0
#HIV #history #research #medicine #genome #health #AIDS
Them French...
ReplyDeleteDidn't know about this story..
I've read other papers and books about HIV that claim there's evidence of deaths from symptoms that look like HIV dating back to the 1920's, and that there were verifiable (from tissue samples) cases in the 1950's from different places around the world. We don't know how long it's been around, but it's far older than Dugas.
ReplyDeleteTrue, the origin of the AIDS pandemic has been traced to the 1920s somewhere in Congo but the question was...who brought AIDS to US?
ReplyDeleteAnd Dugas got the "patient zero" role.
Well at least till now.
Not French, Canadian; and therefore American. But whatever.
ReplyDeleteHe got "patient zero" all because of poor survey recording short hand. The survey was conducted in California and respondents were labelled by their city (LA1). He was labelled as O (oh) for "outside California" and someone misinterpreted that as 0 (zero). Too bad his name was dragged through the mud for so long.
ReplyDelete