By DRS. DAVID NIESEL AND NORBERT HERZOG

New viruses are becoming part of the human experience more often. Who can forget the rise of HIV around the world in the early 1980s? In the 1987 book, “And the Band Played On,” the author identified flight attendant Gaetan Dugas as “Patient Zero,” the person who introduced HIV into the United States. However, a recent genetic analysis reveals that this was wrong.

In June of 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report of five previously healthy, gay, young men in Los Angeles with a rare lung infection with Pneumocystis carnii or PCP. This infection is indicative of a weakened immune system. Little did we know that this was the start of the U.S. AIDS epidemic. In addition, doctors also reported cases of a rare, aggressive form of skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma in some gay men. On June 8, the CDC began to look for risk factors and to create case definitions for this new disease. By the end of 1981, 270 gay men were diagnosed with severe immune deficiency and 121 of them had died. On Sept. 24, 1982, the CDC coined the term AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

In the 1987 book, the original carrier of HIV who brought AIDS into the United States was named as Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant. Dugas died of Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1984 at age 31. It was claimed that he was Patient Zero who spread HIV to the gay bath houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles, sparking the AIDS epidemic. Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona has compiled evidence proving that Dugas was not Patient Zero. After the AIDS virus was identified, scientists tested for HIV in stored blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in the late 1970s in San Francisco and New York. Worobey determined the sequences of the genomes of those HIV viruses.

When HIV replicates its genome, errors are made producing mutations. Using these sequences, it was determined how these HIV’s are related. Results indicated that the epidemic most likely started in New York City around 1970. The U.S. HIV resembles older HIV isolates from Caribbean countries and that HIV reached San Francisco in 1975. Although Dugas did visit Haiti in 1977, he does not appear to be the key person in starting the U.S. epidemic. In fact, the virus he carried fell in the middle of the family tree, not at the beginning.

So Dugas was wrongly vilified in the book, “And The Band Played On” — and in the press. Two of his doctors are quoted accusing Dugas of being a “sociopath” for his large number of sexual partners. However, it was not until 1983 that there was consensus that AIDS was transmitted sexually and in contaminated blood. So Dugas was not aware he was passing on AIDS as the result of his sexual activity until the year before his death. Now we also know that he is unlikely to have been the man who brought HIV to the U.S. Unfortunately, his lifestyle likely led to him infecting many partners contributing to the scale of the epidemic.

Medical Discovery News is a weekly radio and print broadcast highlighting medical and scientific breakthroughs hosted by professor emeritus Norbert Herzog and professor David Niesel, biomedical scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Learn more at www.medicaldiscoverynews.com.