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.

Rather, this man was one of the thousands of people in North America who were infected with HIV in the years before the virus was officially recognized, according to the new findings published today (Oct. 26) in the journal Nature.

The man, Gaétan Dugas, was a Canadian flight attendant, and was thought to have introduced HIV into one or more major U.S. cities by infecting his sexual partners, setting off the AIDS crisis that struck the U.S.in the 1980s, the researchers said. Dugas died from AIDS in 1984. "Gaétan Dugas is one of the most demonized 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," study co-author Richard McKay, a historian at the University of Cambridge in England, said in a statement. [Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders] The first AIDS patients were recognized in San Francisco and other places in California, in 1981. But the new results show that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, likely first arrived in the U.S. in New York City in 1970, the researchers said.