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New Study Shows HIV Epidemic Started Spreading In New York In 1970, Clears the Name of 'Patient Zero' (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A new genetic study confirms theories that the global epidemic of HIV and AIDS started in New York around 1970, and it also clears the name of a gay flight attendant long vilified as being "Patient Zero." Researchers got hold of frozen samples of blood taken from patients years before the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS was ever recognized, and teased out genetic material from the virus from that blood. They use it to show that HIV was circulating widely during the 1970s, and certainly before people began noticing a "gay plague" in New York in the early 1980s. "We can date the jump into the U.S. in about 1970 and 1971," Michael Worobey, an expert on the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, told reporters in a telephone briefing. Their findings also suggest HIV moved from New York to San Francisco in about 1976, they report in the journal Nature. Their findings confirm widespread theories that HIV first leapt from apes to humans in Africa around the beginning of the 20th century and circulated in central Africa before hitting the Caribbean in the 1960s. The genetic evidence supports the theory that the virus came from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, to New York in 1970. From there it spread explosively before being exported to Europe, Australia and Asia. The Worobey team also sequenced samples of virus taken from Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant named as "Patient Zero." Dugas died in 1984 and stunned researchers when he told them he'd had about 250 sexual partners a year between 1979 and 1981, although it later became clear that was not uncommon. The sequences make it clear he was a victim of an epidemic that had already been raging, and not its originator, Worobey said. "It's shocking how this man's name has been sullied and destroyed by this incorrect history," said Peter Staley, a former Wall Street bond trader who became an AIDS activist in New York in the 1980s. "He was not Patient Zero and this study confirms it through genetic analysis," Staley told NBC News. "No one should be blamed for the spread of viruses," Worobey said.
What where the best and brightest US pathologists and epidemiologists doing for a decade?
With all the science grants and funding for cancer and the chemical/bio weapons treaty funding mix changes, what happened to basic public health reporting in the USA?
Did no doctor not report strange new issues? Did no pathologists not have the feeling a book chapter might be before them or funding to chase?
Did no public health official or health bureaucrats not have some map or database of interesting cases that got reported and think to follow up?
Was public health funding so cut back in 1970-1980 to risk public health? Was cancer the only issue getting extra US funding thanks to lobbyists and the party connected?
Where was the academic curiosity? Autopsies, slides? Rare conditions not often seen? What was it about the Vietnam war decade and a few years later that ensured US academics missed a really basic and interesting public health issue?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The only special pass in this case is that the HIV infected people of the 1970s and 80s had no idea they were sick.
And a huge number of people carrying a huge number of sexually transmitted diseases today.
Chlamydia often presents with no symptoms in women (https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/chlamydia).
Herpes is contagious through frequent viral shedding (about 20% of the time) even if the carrier has never noticed any kind of outbreak (http://justherpes.com/facts/herpes-viral-shedding/).
Hepatitis of all forms may not have any concerning symptoms until the disease has progressed (http://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/symptoms)
HIV can lie mostly dormant for years and still be transmissible (https://www.aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/just-diagnosed-with-hiv-aids/hiv-in-your-body/stages-of-hiv/)
Primary syphilis presents as a painless ulcer like red spot that disappears after a few days. It's entirely likely to go unnoticed or be passed off as a skin irritation (http://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis.htm)
HPV can cause changes in skin tissue without ever causing a traditional "wart" or even a noticeable difference, yet HPV is being blamed for a large number of anal and genital cancers (https://www.dermnetnz.org/topics/anogenital-warts)
If people had any idea they were sick we could probably have stopped the STD epidemic years ago. The reality is that a lot of people don't know they are sick. Those at the highest risk (many sexual partners, injecting drug use, etc) often understate the risk. Testing is reasonably good at catching the serious diseases like HIV, Syphilis and Hepatitis. The tests are even sensitive enough now to detect the disease a week or two after the primary infection.
There was an outbreak of a rare HIV strain in Australia recently that baffled doctors for a while. The patients tested negative to HIV but still had HIV-like symptoms. It was later discovered that they had the strain so rare that nobody tests for it unless it is suspected the patient has it. I can't find a reference to the article I read about it.
"... the global epidemic of HIV and AIDS started in New York around 1970"
This sentence is copied from the article, but on further reading you see that it is the USA epidemic, not the global epidemic, which is being talked about.
Compare the opening sentence of this article, "Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west."
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Very rarely with 100s of partners a year, yet this is "not uncommon" in the gay male community.
They are on average promiscuous on a level heterosexuals just don't get close to.
Perhaps because it's an election year, I've gotten into the habit of fact-checking statements which sound suspiciously like they've been pulled out of an ass.
Or, maybe I just lament the ending of Mythbusters. Either way, Myth Busted.
TL:DR version: They took some usage data from a popular dating site and discovered that both gays and straight people have roughly the same amount of luck getting laid. Science, bitch.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
In no civilized country other than the USA workers have limits on sick days or have to ask and get an approval from a manager. All countries except USA allow for as much paid (80% to 100% pay) sick days as listed on the doctor's note.
Not true. They knew they had a deadly STD on their hands and they knew he was infected. And they told him. Between that time and his death he had unprotected sex with more than 250 men. He knew he had "the gay cancer" and even told a guy, after sex, "now you have it too". That's pathological lack of empathy, not a lack of information.
He may be "cleared" of being Patient Zero, but he still sounds like an asshole. As the article says, he "ignored a doctor’s demand that he stop having unprotected sex, and coldbloodedly told some sex partners that he had 'gay cancer' and now they might get it."