[Jim Noble]

There was a case in 1959 in the UK and another in a black teenager in St Louis in 1969.

The Dugas story was possibly true but not the explanation for the epidemic.

[PapaBear3625]

There was a case in 1959 in the UK and another in a black teenager in St Louis in 1969. The Dugas story was possibly true but not the explanation for the epidemic.

As long as the infected persons were not wildly promiscuous spreaders of bodily fluids, the probability of an infected person passing it on before he died was fairly low.

Once you had infected people doing the gay bathhouse circuit in the major cities, it spread rapidly.

[Kid Shelleen]

>>The Dugas story was possibly true but not the explanation for the epidemic.

My take away from the article is that the epidemic was introduced into the western hemisphere from Haiti via Haitian health care workers displaced from the Congo.

From the article:
"In the early 1970s, a plasma-donation clinic, run by a Miami investor, opened in Haiti offering residents $3 per liter. Shared needles at this clinic likely increased the infection rates in Haiti and shipped the disease to the United States.