Researchers Clear ‘Patient Zero’ From AIDS Origin Story

“But it can also mean the absolute beginning”.

And an airline employee was unfairly vilified as “Patient Zero” in the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

The study by the University of Cambridge provides the most conclusive evidence to date that Dugas could not have been responsible.

“Some people may say that we knew this already, and in broad strokes, that’s true”, says Beatrice Hahn, from the Perelman School of Medicine, who studies the evolution of HIV.

Insights gained from this study may help researchers and health officials better understand how pathogens move through populations and lead to more effective strategies aimed at reining in, or eradicating, unsafe pathogens.

Scientists have returned to this episode in a rigorous new Nature paper that traces the actual origin of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the USA back to the early 1970s. And the media expanded his role in the epidemic further, erroneously so, according to the new study.

“Whoa! This is the first indication that we had that the disease might be sexually transmitted from one person to another”, Darrow told NPR. A new study of blood samples from the late ’70s confirms that he did not-the virus’s presence in America predates him. “The lineage of the virus we’re talking about in this paper, so-called subtype B of HIV-1 group M, is just one of many branches on that evolutionary tree”.

The scientists used a molecular-level technique in their research. “We therefore recovered the complete HIV-1 genome of Patient 0 and examined it against the backdrop provided by the 1970s sequences”.

So Worobey started looking for older samples.

Worobey’s lab developed a technique called RNA jackhammering, which breaks down the huge human genome in the samples into tiny overlapping chunks and extracts the RNA of the virus.

Genetic analysis of HIV taken from a 1983 blood sample from Dugas showed he was not even a “base” case for strains of the virus prevalent at the time. Exactly how it spread within the U.S.is less clear, because researchers didn’t at the time have contemporary data on the HIV genome in the U.S. When those samples were later screened, almost 7 percent of the NY samples tested positive for HIV, and a little over 3 percent of the San Francisco samples did as well.

Worobey said his research indicates that the epidemic’s genesis was in New York City – and not San Francisco. But the new findings suggest that HIV in the tissues may not cause AIDS but could contribute to the development of unrelated conditions, such as cancer and heart disease, according to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers.

A man who was believed to have introduced HIV to North America, the man sometimes referred to as “Patient Zero”, was actually not the initial source of the virus on this continent, new research shows.

While scientists struggled to work out the mechanics of the virus, the accidental phrase “Patient Zero” – never before used to describe the first case of any epidemic – took hold in the public’s imagination.

Shilts himself died from AIDS-related complications in 1994.

“He was evidently just one of many thousands infected prior to the recognition of HIV/AIDS”, they wrote in a supplementary discussion also published by Nature.

The researchers say it may be naïve to expect Patient Zero’s legendary status, or the popular impulse to attribute blame for disease outbreaks, to ever disappear.

Dugas was first identified as “Patient Zero” in Randy Shilts” 1987 bestseller about the AIDS epidemic, titled “And the Band Played On.’ The former Air Canada flight attendant died of AIDS in 1984, but new discoveries about the genetic makeup of the AIDS virus have revealed that Dugas was not the source of the infection in the United States, merely another victim of the disease during its earliest days.

Mr. Dugas was the victim of a typographical error, Dr. McKay said Wednesday. He donated plasma for analysis and provided 72 names of sexual partners he’d had in the previous three years (though that was only a fraction of the hundreds of men he said he’d been with). That wasn’t necessarily an unusual number.

Reports emerged in early 1982 of historical sexual links between several gay men with AIDS in Los Angeles and investigators undertook a study to interview them for the names of their sexual contacts. “It was a very hard thing – because they had fought so much for sexual freedom and for recognition and acceptance – to be told that every gay man is potentially a carrier of this awful disease”.