Research has shown that HIV virus did not spread to US via patient zero.
The man blamed for bringing HIV to the United States just had his name cleared.
New research has proved that Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant who was dubbed “patient zero,” did not spread HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to the United States.
A cutting-edge analysis of blood samples from the 1970s offers new insight into how the virus spread to North America via the Caribbean from Africa. More than 1.2 million people in the United States currently live with HIV.
The research, conducted by an international team of scientists, was published this week in the journal Nature.
“No one should be blamed for the spread of a virus that no one even knew about, and how the virus moved from the Caribbean to the US in New York City in the 1970s is an open question,” co-author of the research, Dr. Michael Worobey, a professor and head of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Arizona, said at a news conference Tuesday.
“It could have been a person of any nationality. It could have even been blood products. A lot of blood products used in the United States in the 1970s actually came from Haiti,” he said. “What we’ve done here is try to get at the origins of the first cases of AIDS that were ever noticed. … When you step back in time, you see a very interesting pattern.”
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