HIV ‘Patient Zero’ cleared after research finds he didn’t spread HIV to the US.
By Josh Lee
The blame game is perhaps the least useful tactic in the fight against HIV. It begun with Gaetan Dugas, a gay flight attendant who became known as Patient Zero – the first person to have HIV in the US.
He became one of the most demonised patients in history. But today, the BBC reports that he has been cleared of the claims that he spread the virus to the US.
A new study has found that he was one of thousands of people already living with HIV in the 1970s. While Gaetan is thought to have contracted HIV in the late seventies, scientists said that the samples they collected from HIV viruses from the end of the decade contained “so much genetic diversity that they could not have originated in the late 1970s.”
Researchers now believe the US epidemic begun in 1970/71.
Dr Richard McKay, a science historian at the University of Cambridge, said: “Gaetan Dugas is one of the most demonised patients in history and one of a long line of individuals and groups vilified in the belief that they somehow fuelled epidemics with malicious intent.”