Patient Zero With HIV Rehabilitated

Patient Zero with HIV rehabilitated

Dugas became widely known after the publication of the book "And the orchestra continued to play" by the journalist Randy Shilts in 1987, in which the flight attendant was first called "patient zero". This view has not been proven.

Gaetan Duga. Photo: wikipedia.org /

A new study suggests that Gaétan Dugas, dubbed "patient zero" and considered the main HIV vector in the United States, is not really to blame for the epidemic.

It is known that Duga worked as a flight attendant and had a rather promiscuous sex life. The AIDS epidemic, registered in the United States in the 1980s, was previously associated precisely with the numerous homosexual contacts of men. He himself died of AIDS in 1984.

Dugas became widely known after the publication of the book "And the orchestra continued to play" by the journalist Randy Shilts in 1987, in which the flight attendant was first called "patient zero". This point of view has not been proven, but has taken hold.

Later, researchers began to study the issue of the spread of HIV in the United States. They concluded that Getan Duga was one of several thousand North Americans who contracted HIV several years before the US epidemic. The first patient with AIDS was registered in the United States in 1981, but now scientists have concluded that HIV, which caused the disease, entered the country ten years earlier.

The authors studied blood samples from patients from San Francisco and New York, which were taken in 1978 and 1979, and also studied information about Duga's blood. They were able to understand how the virus spread throughout the country: having appeared in New York, it reached California, where the first officially registered AIDS patient lived.

Getan Duga could not have been patient zero in any way, he is one of thousands of those who were infected earlier. It is also believed that Duga was noted in the medical records as patient O, where O meant Out (side) -of-California (outside California), later the letter O began to be perceived as the number zero.

The perpetrators of the epidemic, most likely, were also not one person, but a whole group of carriers of the virus. In the United States and other countries, the virus came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Source: HIV's 'Patient Zero' Wrongly Blamed for AIDS Epidemic

A man who was believed to have introduced HIV to North America - the man sometimes referred to as "Patient Zero" - was actually not the initial source of the virus on this continent, new research shows.

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