The myth of Patient Zero: scientists clear man long blamed for causing US Aids epidemic

A labelling error and reckless media hype in the 1980s led to unjustly branding a gay Canadian airline steward as “Patient Zero” in the US Aids epidemic, scientific and historical sleuthing revealed on Wednesday.

The deadly virus, which has claimed more than 650,000 lives in the United States in over four decades, instead jumped from the Caribbean to New York City as early as 1970, well before the infections associated with the steward, researchers reported in the journal Nature.

The findings, based on a 33-year-old blood sample analysed with new techniques, proves once-and-for-all that the man posthumously vilified as the American HIV epicentre, Gaetan Dugas, was simply one of the disease’s many victims.

Before he died in 1984, he helped scientists trace how Aids had spread by identifying dozens of his sexual partners.

“Dugas is one of the most demonised patients in history,” said Richard McKay, a public health historian and one of the study’s two lead authors.