Replies

Gaëtan Dugas (French: [ɡaetɑ̃ dyˈɡa]; February 20, 1953 – March 30, 1984) was a Canadian who worked for Air Canada as a flight attendant and an early AIDS patient.[1] In March 1984, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study tracking the sexual liaisons and practices of gay, and bisexual men in California, New York, and some other states found Dugas to be the center of a network of sexual partners, which led to him being dubbed "patient zero",[2] although suspicions that he initially brought HIV to North America were disproven. He is used as an example in epidemiology of an index case. Dugas traveled the world and had many sexual liaisons with men.[3][4] At the time, gay culture was largely illegal, underground, and clandestine. Gay bars and gay bath houses were social settings for gay and closeted men to meet. The extent to which HIV/AIDS was known about in the early 1980s, how it was spread, or when Dugas was diagnosed are disputed.[3] Dugas died in Quebec City on March 30, 1984, as a result of kidney failure caused by AIDS-related infections.[5] Dugas is featured prominently in Randy Shilts's book And the Band Played On, which documents the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic in the United States. Shilts portrays Gaëtan Dugas as having almost sociopathic behavior by allegedly intentionally infecting, or at least recklessly endangering, others with the virus. Dugas is described as being a charming, handsome sexual athlete who, according to his own estimation, averaged hundreds of sex partners a year. He claimed to have had over 2,500 sexual partners across North America since becoming sexually active in 1972.[6] Genetic analysis of HIV provides some support for the Patient Zero theory. Dugas is now believed to be part of a cluster of homosexual men who traveled frequently, were extremely sexually active, and died of AIDS at a very early stage in the epidemic.[7].. A November 2007 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences dismisses the Patient Zero hypothesis, and instead claims that HIV was transmitted from Africa to Haiti in 1966, and from Haiti to the United States in 1969.[9][10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas