Interesting articleon NPR - apparently Gaetan Dugas did not bring AIDS to the US.
They did genetic sequencing, and the disease first appeared in the US since the 70s but was under the radar. He did apparently infect a lot of people, and he was very forthcoming about his varied sexual contacts, but no Typhoid Mary.
I had always heard that he was. My ignorance fought, at least.
Regards,
Shodan
Well did he at least bring flowers or a cheap bottle of wine?
Actually, it’s good to see this ignorance being fought.
Actually, hasn’t the Robert Rayford caseproved AIDS was in the U.S. as early as the 60s?
I thought they were pretty sure he didn’t bring AIDS in way back in the 1980s. He was “patient zero” in the sense that he was infected, infected a lot of others, and flew around to hub cities - so was a vector in quick geographic expansion of the virus - the center of a lot of early clusters. But figuring out the exact point of entry into the U.S. would be pretty impossible.
To be pedantic, Typhoid Mary didn’t introduce her namesake disease into the U.S. either.
What she has in common with Dugas is that both were significant vectors, and continued their activities even after it was made plain to them that they were infecting others.
He wasn’t patient Zero in any sense. He was patient O, as in the 15th letter of the alphabet. A pretty important vector, apparently, but not what Randy Shilts or the limited knowledge of the day made him out to be(back then, they thought the dormancy period was a lot shorter than it was.
As far as I can tell, “patient zero” isn’t even a proper term of art in epidemiology.
The common phrase appears to be “index case” or “index patient”.
That was always the impression I got. I don’t ever remember being led to believe he was the person who brought the disease in just an important vector.
And it didn’t spontaneously arise in him.
I have a friend who, in the mid 1990s, attended a pharmacists’ convention and met a woman who had practiced in the Miami area since the early 1970s. She said that several years after she graduated, the hospital where she worked started seeing people with unusual infections that almost always defied treatment; this was attributed to antibiotic resistance (which was an issue then as well) but she now believes that many of those people, who were usually of assorted Caribbean descents but not always, probably had AIDS.