Posted on 02/22/2015 1:28:28 PM PST by Kid Shelleen
In Randy Shilts history of AIDS, And the Band Played On, he tells the story of an Air Canada steward named Gaëtan Dugas, who suffered from what Dugas called gay cancer and infected 40 people or more with HIV. He was, Shilts wrote, Patient Zero. Modal TriggerDugas, through his extensive travels and unrepentant, unprotected sex even after he was diagnosed, undoubtedly helped spread AIDS. But was he the man who brought the disease to America?
In the new book, The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rain Forest (W.W. Norton), author David Quammen says no.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Whoa! Amazing theory and very plausible.
Gaëtan Dugas?
The question, of course, has always been how did Dugas get it?
Somewhere along the line, some African had sex with a chimpanzee...
I knew a Lebanese Christian family who immigrated to New York via Haiti. The mother was tall, attractive, francophone, fluent in English and worked for Air France at JFK. The father was short, ugly and they lived apart, estranged, though he kept in contact with his children. The father retained business interests in Haiti, and traveled there occasionally. He died in the late 1970’s after a long illness, which baffled his doctors. I’ve always wondered if, ...
Read the article. The supposition is that an African hunted a chimpanzee around 1908, and became infected.
Somewhere along the line, some African had sex with a chimpanzee...
Or ate raw chimp or got bitten by one or cut himself while slaughtering one or sat in the front row of a monkey knife fight or ...
A gay friend died in Baltimore in 1975/6. He suffered from IDS for about 4 years. This was 5 or more years before AIDS was officially diagnosed in this population. Since then we have suspected he was an early undiagnosed case of AIDS.
It does make more sense than the one fruity flight attendant story.
He was an airline steward. He flew all over the world, and all over the US. Back then, the bath house rave parties in New York and San Francisco were going full swing. He had hundreds of "partners."
Read the article and that way you won’t end up saying something dumb
Truth is stranger than fiction. A pulp writer could not have come up with a better name.
Yuuuuuuuuuck!
Probably through eating a chimpanzee.
The first Bug Hunter.
I once got brucellosis from cutting my finger while quartering a caribou I shot along the Kuskokwim River. The caribou blood mixed with my blood; I almost died from the disease. I can easily believe that this can happen.
That was the theory commonly offered back in the 1980s, but this indicates it was otherwise. Of course who would really know?
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.