HIV Patient Zero absolved from being the “father” of AIDS outbreak in the US
Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian homosexual flight attendant, who was a relatively early HIV patient and AIDS activist was widely blamed for starting the epidemic in the US and dubbed as Patient Zero. But a new study exonerates him from all claims that he spread the disease in the country.
The study showed that Dugas, one of the most demonized and antagonized patients in history, was just one of the thousands of people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the 1970s. The researchers also found that New York was a crucial hub for the spread of the virus.
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the disease caused by HIV, only began to be recognized in 1981 when unusual symptoms started appearing in homosexual men.
But the researchers analyzed stored blood samples, some of which contained HIV, from hepatitis trials in the 1970s to be able to look further back in time. The research team at the University of Arizona in the US developed a new method to reconstruct the genetic code HIV in those patients.
After 2,000 samples from New York and San Francisco were screened, the researchers were able to get eight complete HIV genetic codes which gave scientists the information they needed to build HIV’s family tree and trace when it arrived in the US.
According to Dr. Michael Worobey, one of the researchers, the samples had so much genetic diversity that they could not have originated in the late 1970s. “We can place the most precise dates on the origins of the US epidemic at about 1970 or 1971,” Dr. Worobey added.
The researchers also analyzed the HIV genetic code taken from Dugas’s blood and the results, much like a failed paternity test, showed that the virus in Dugas’s blood was not the “father” of the US epidemic.
Dugas, who died in 1984, was initially labeled Patient “O” (the letter) by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because he was a case “Out-of-California”. The letter “O” eventually became the number “0” and the Patient Zero was born. Until today, the term is still used to describe the index case of an outbreak.
New York’s key role in the spread of the disease was also uncovered in the study.
Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo was seen as the city that started the global pandemic, eventually spreading to the Caribbean and the US in the 1970s.
“Just as Kinshasa was a key turning point for the pandemic virus as a whole, New York City looks like a turning point and acts as this hub from which the virus moves to the west coast and eventually to Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South America and all sorts of other places,” Dr. Worobey said.
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