Public healthExonerating “Patient Zero”: Debunking the myth of the origins of the 1980s U.S. AIDS crisis
The genetic testing of decades-old blood samples has demonstrated that Gaétan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant who became notorious as the human epicenter of the U.S. AIDS crisis of the 1980s – and the first person to be labeled the “Patient Zero” of any epidemic – was simply one of many thousands infected in the years before HIV was recognized. In fact, the very term Patient Zero was the result of a misreading: In one of the early cluster studies of AIDS patients in California, Dugas was code-named “Patient O” (for “[O]utside-of-California”) – but some researchers discussing the investigation began interpreting the ambiguous oval as a digit, and referring to Patient O as Patient 0.
A new study proves that a flight attendant who became notorious as the human epicenter of the U.S. AIDS crisis of the 1980s – and the first person to be labeled the “Patient Zero” of any epidemic – was simply one of many thousands infected in the years before HIV was recognized.
Research by a historian from the University of Cambridge and the genetic testing of decades-old blood samples by a team of U.S. scientists has demonstrated that Gaétan Dugas, a French-Canadian gay man posthumously blamed by the media for spreading HIV across North America, was not the epidemic’s Patient Zero.
In fact, work by Dr. Richard McKay, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow from Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, reveals how the very term Patient Zero – still used today in press coverage of outbreaks from Ebola to swine flu to describe the first known case – was created inadvertently in the earliest years of investigating AIDS.
The University of Cambridge says that before he died, Dugas provided investigators with a significant amount of personal information to assist with studies into whether AIDS was caused by a sexually transmitted agent. McKay’s research suggests that this, combined with confusion between a letter and a number, contributed to the invention of Patient Zero and the global defamation of Dugas.
Dr. McKay’s work has added important contextual information to the latest study, led by Dr. Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona and published in Nature.The study has compared a new analysis of Dugas’s blood with eight other archived serum samples dating back to the late 1970s.
“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 fueled epidemics with malicious intent,” says McKay.
While his wider research traces this impulse to blame back several centuries, for the Nature paper McKay located the immediate roots of the term Patient Zero in an early “cluster study” of U.S. AIDS patients.
Mistaken for zero
Reports emerged in early 1982 of historical sexual links between several gay men with AIDS in Los Angeles, and investigators from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) undertook a study to interview these men for the names of their sexual contacts.
