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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Gaetan Dugas, a Quebec-born flight attendant at Air Canada, was labeled as AIDS Patient Zero in a 1984. A scientific study, published by Science [sciencemag.org], says this is not so:

A new genetic study of HIV isolated from blood samples taken in the late 1970s clarifies where and when the epidemic began in the United States—and it does not involve a man infamously labeled as "Patient Zero." Researchers lead by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona in Tucson obtained eight blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 for hepatitis B studies. They isolated HIV from the blood and resurrected nearly complete viral genomes. They did the same with a 1983 blood sample from Patient Zero, a Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas whom journalist Randy Shilts made famous in his best-selling 1987 book about the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Using a technique known as the molecular clock that allows researchers to create a family tree of different genetic isolates and place them in time, Worobey explained in a presentation at an HIV/AIDS meeting in Boston last week that the virus likely came to New York City in 1970 and was linked to viral isolates then circulating in Haiti and other Caribbean countries.
Dugas's isolate fell in about the middle of the tree they created of early U.S. isolates, and clearly showed that he was not Patient Zero—the first person to introduce the virus—in the United States.

[break point]
Food for thought

The Wikipedia entry for the And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic book - the background [wikipedia.org]:

Shilts decided to write And the Band Played On after attending an awards ceremony in 1983 where he was to receive a commendation for his coverage on AIDS. As described in the book, television announcer Bill Kurtis gave the keynote address and told a joke: "What's the hardest part about having AIDS? Trying to convince your wife that you're Haitian." Shilts responded to the joke by saying that it "says everything about how the media had dealt with AIDS. Bill Kurtis felt that he could go in front of a journalists' group in San Francisco and make AIDS jokes. First of all, he could assume that nobody there would be gay and, if they were gay, they wouldn't talk about it and that nobody would take offense at that. To me, that summed up the whole problem of dealing with AIDS in the media. Obviously, the reason I covered AIDS from the start was that, to me, it was never something that happened to those other people."

The somehow sordid compromise [kevinmd.com] the author needed to take to achieve his goal:

Three years later, Shilts revealed Dugas as the Cluster Study’s Patient Zero. While Shilts (who also later died of AIDS) held a nobler agenda in writing the book, the publication’s success was initially in doubt. Phil Tiemeyer, author of “Plane Queer” documented his interview with Michael Denneny, Shilts’ publisher. Denneny described the initial dismal prospects for “And The Band Played On” that motivated them to find a more creative way to promote the book. The solution was to use Patient Zero and present him as the handsome, promiscuous French-Canadian airline steward who may have brought AIDS to America. This was the pathway to the bestseller list, and it worked.

Before casting the stone, read the "The origins of evils" section in TFA I linked last. When it comes to AIDS, I wouldn't be so hasty in assigning all the blame on Reagan [soylentnews.org], he was nothing but the manifested expression of the American society at that time... mmmmaybe with a pinch of righteousness added on top (they call it "authoritarianism" these days, eh?).

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