Gaétan Dugas was a handsome Air Canada flight attendant who passed away at the age of 31 of complications from AIDS on March 30, 1984
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In the tortuous mythology of the AIDS epidemic, one legend never seems to die: Patient Zero, a.k.a. Gaétan Dugas, a globe-trotting, sexually insatiable French Canadian flight attendant who supposedly picked up H.I.V. in Haiti or Africa and spread it to dozens, even hundreds, of men before his death in 1984.
Mr. Dugas was once blamed for setting off the entire American AIDS epidemic, which traumatized the nation in the 1980s and has since killed more than 500,000 Americans. The New York Post even described him with the headline “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS.”
The strain of H.I.V. responsible for almost all AIDS cases in the United States, which was carried from Zaire to Haiti around 1967, spread from there to New York City around 1971, researchers concluded in the journal Nature. From New York, it spread to San Francisco around 1976.
The new analysis shows that Mr. Dugas’s blood, sampled in 1983, contained a viral strain already infecting men in New York before he began visiting gay bars in the city after being hired by Air Canada in 1974.
The researchers also reported that originally, Mr. Dugas was not even called Patient Zero — in an early epidemiological study of cases, he was designated Patient O, for “outside Southern California,” where the study began. The ambiguous circular symbol on a chart was later read as a zero, stoking the notion that blame for the epidemic could be placed on one man.
Myths like that of Patient Zero echo in prevention efforts even today, experts said. Many vulnerable groups, including young gay men and African women, fail to use protective drugs or avoid testing because they fear being stigmatized or accused of being carriers.
Reflecting on the epidemic’s early days, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then a doctor treating AIDS patients and now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he remembered it seeming plausible at the time that one person was responsible.
In hindsight, he added, the idea now seems absurd. “We were unaware of how widespread it was in Africa,” Dr. Fauci said. “Also, we thought, based on very little data, that it was only about two years from infection to death.”
The new data is consistent with the scenario described in 2011 in “The Origins of AIDS,” by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.
Relying on previous genetic research and African colonial records, Dr. Pépin showed that H.I.V. was carried from Kinshasa to Haiti in the 1960s — most likely by one of the thousands of Haitian civil servants recruited by the United Nations to work in the former Belgian Congo after colonial rule collapsed.
Gaétan Dugas, the flight attendant once described as Patient Zero in the American AIDS epidemic.
In Haiti, he theorized, a few cases were multiplied by unsterile conditions at a private blood-collecting company, Hemo-Caribbean, that opened in 1971 and exported 1,600 gallons of plasma to the United States monthly. Plasma clotting factors were used by American hemophiliacs, many of whom died of AIDS.
Haiti was also a sex-tourism destination for gay men, another route the virus could have taken to New York.
The blood samples analyzed in the new study were collected in 1978 and 1979 in New York City and San Francisco as part of an effort to make a hepatitis B vaccine. Researchers stored almost 16,000 blood samples; nearly 7 percent of those from New York and 4 percent of those from California later turned out to be infected with H.I.V.
Killing Patient Zero profiles Quebec man unfairly targeted in AIDS epidemic
Gaetan Dugas became demonized because of his promiscuity — and a typographical error
The Canadian Press·
Gaetan Dugas, who was a Quebec flight attendant, was falsely blamed for the spread of AIDS in North America. (Hot Docs)In the late 1970s, Quebecois flight attendant Gaetan Dugas was openly and proudly gay, described by friends as flamboyant, sexual and generous, with a supportive family and penchant for makeup. Unashamed of his lifestyle despite lingering societal stigmas, he co-operated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early 1980s after he contracted what was initially called "gay cancer" in the media, providing blood samples and the names of 72 of his former sex partners. Dugas played a key role in contributing to a study that helped prove HIV/AIDS was sexually transmitted. But as the new documentary "Killing Patient Zero" notes, he became demonized because of his promiscuity — and a typographical error. In the CDC study, Dugas was labelled "patient O," as in the letter "O," representing "Out-of-California Case," a state where researchers began to look for links.
However, some misinterpreted the "O" as the number "0," as in "patient zero," leading to the long-standing and incorrect implication that Dugas brought AIDS to North America. "This is a man whose name needs to be rehabilitated ... Dugas really should be proclaimed a hero of the fight against AIDS," Laurie Lynd, the doc's Toronto-based director, told The Current's guest host David Common. "For him to have been vilified, it's like the classic 'No good deed goes unpunished,'" he told The Canadian Press. Making its world premiere Friday at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Killing Patient Zero details Dugas's life as well as the homophobia and prejudice surrounding the AIDS epidemic. American author Fran Lebowitz is among the 40 interviewees in the film, which is based on Richard McKay's book Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic.
Dugas, who grew up in Quebec City, was one of the first 57 AIDS cases reported to CDC and was part of its cluster study in Atlanta. He died on March 30, 1984 but became an international name in '87, when American journalist Randy Shilts published his book on the AIDS epidemic, And The Band Played On. In the book and a feature in the New York Post titled The Man Who Gave Us AIDS, Shilts identified Dugas as "patient zero" and accused him of being the source of the U.S. outbreak.
Shilts, who died in 1994, maintained Dugas wasn't singled out and noted many others were also named in the book. The 60-year-old Lynd, who is openly gay, said he read Shilts's story about Dugas in 1990 and thought it was correct until he saw the 1993 John Greyson film Zero Patience, which debunks the myth. "It was a real gift to be able to revisit this story, just personally, to look at those years again and to be able to rehabilitate Gaetan's name," said Lynd. "I think he's a gay everyman. I think what he did was heroic with the CDC."
Laurie Lynd is the Toronto-based director of the documentary Killing Patient Zero. (Hot Docs)
Still, Shilts's book also drew attention to the epidemic at a time when many politicians weren't talking about it, added Lynd, noting it woke him up politically and prompted him to make his short film RSVP, about a man who loses his partner to AIDS. "It's hard for us to realize how little traction it had gained in public attention. Randy's book was a kind of wakeup call," Lynd said. "In a way, Randy did the wrong thing for the right reasons." Lynd said he worried his film would open old wounds for Dugas's family, but they've seen the trailer and will get a link to the doc through McKay, who is in touch with them. "I also hope they will feel it's ... worth it," said Lynd, "because it so thoroughly, I hope, and finally rehabilitates Gaetan's name." Lynd also hopes the film will be "healing" for gay men and women and serve as a reminder that the fight against HIV/AIDS isn't over — and that homophobia is still around. "You need look no further than the gay serial killer in Toronto, where it seems fairly clear that had those victims been straight white men, it would have been handled very differently, and how so many of that killer's victims clearly had to live on the down-low because of the homophobia in their communities," Lynd said. "And we need look no further than our neighbours to the south. I feel homophobia is on the rise again in some ways in this populous climate." Killing Patient Zero premiers at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on April 26.
