STORIES

Gaëtan Dugas died of AIDS at the age of 32 on March 30, 1984, very early in the AIDS epidemic.

Dugas was known by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control as a particularly helpful man from Canada who was forthcoming and transparent about his sexual history, which was very extensive but not entirely unusual for someone who was fully immersed in the sexually liberated gay scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

What was unusual about Dugas was the large number of cities on his map of sexual liaisons, afforded to him by his job as a flight attendant for Air Canada. He leased an apartment in Los Angeles and frequently visited other U.S. travel hubs, and he admittedly was sexually active just about every place he travelled to.

For CDC researchers trying to determine how HIV was spreading in the U.S. population, Dugas was invaluable, readily providing names and addresses for many of his intimate partners and giving data that supported some of the early infection pathways of the virus.  But in 1987, three years after Dugas’ death, he was erroneously vilified as “Patient Zero” and the person who brought the AIDS virus to the United States.

The publication of the book And the Band Played On by journalist Randy Shilts was quickly regarded as the seminal exposé on HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately, Shilts included in his book a profile of so-called “Patient Zero” to illustrate how the virus could spread. The book referred specifically to Dugas as “Patient Zero” and described him as a Canadian flight attendant with a home in Los Angeles and other cities.

The book implied that the first-known source of the HIV spread in the U.S. was Dugas. Media stories about Dugas exploded.  His handsome face accompanied stories in which he was characterized as a kind of “typhoid Mary” who callously spread the virus in the early days of the epidemic.

In actuality, Dugas was not “Patient Zero” and the CDC never considered him as such. The CDC had labeled Dugas as “Patient O,” as in the letter O.

Flash-forward to 2016, when researchers led by evolutionary biologist Dr. Michael Worobey determined that it was impossible for Dugas to have been the original source of HIV in the U.S.
Worobey’s team conducted a genetic study of blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 as part of a hepatitis B study, and based on the results of the data, concluded
that the AIDS virus was already prevalent in the U.S. in the late 1970s.

According to Worobey, “On the family tree of the virus, Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning. Beliefs about Patient Zero are unsupported by scientific data.”