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.

Comments

Interesting radio lab episode on epidemics

[plopez]

At leat I found it interesting

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

AIDS in the 1970s

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up in San Francisco, and by the mid-70s the "skinny dying gay man" was something we already talked about. When AIDS was named and later discovered to be HIV we knew then what that "skinny dying gay man" syndrome was all about.

When many years later Patient 0 was identified with infection starting in the early 1980s I knew right away that they were wrong and that AIDS had reached America at least ten years earlier.

This article shows that. I've always been very surprised that not a single doctor who dealt with AIDS patients before 1980 (and now we know there were hundreds of them) stepped up and called out the timeline as being utterly wrong.

Re:AIDS in the 1970s

[silentcoder]

>They are on average promiscuous on a level heterosexuals just don't get close to.

Not for lack of trying - the only difference is that half the gay men have not spent their whole lives being told that their total value as a person is dependent on how little they have sex, that if they enjoy it they have bad self respect etc. etc. in fact the gay male population is entirely made up of people who have been told all their lives that their value as a person is measured by how MANY people they have sex with.

The hetero version sort of cancels out - with one gender pushed to constantly seek sex and one pushed to constantly try and avoid it (that this is a fuckup in every possible sense aside - my only point is that it gets you fairly steady numbers), but in the gay community the 'avoid' conditioning doesn't exist.
Interestingly lesbians tend not to be particularly promiscuous and the average lesbian has the same amount of sex and partners per year as the average heterosexual woman - which supports the idea that social conditioning is the major influencing factor.

Re: great

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I remember reading about a study done in Africa where somebody found old blood samples from the 1950s (maybe earlier?), tested them for HIV antibodies, and found not one, but *several* that subsequent testing confirmed. HIV might not have reached *America* until the 60s or 70s, but it was *definitely* making its way around Africa at least a decade or two earlier.

Re:Conspiracy Theories

[MightyMartian]

According to this article, the family of viruses HIV belongs to have been infecting primates for millions of years. As to HIV-1 and HIV-2, it has this to say about probable origins:

The HIV-2 strain is widely accepted to have been passed from sooty mangabeys in west Africa to humans, probably bushmeat hunters or those keeping the primates as pets, or both. Scientists believe HIV-1 was passed from chimpanzees to humans.

So what we likely have is a couple of events, unlikely in and of themselves, but where there is enough interspecies contact, as keeping infected pets or eating infected bushmeat, that the these two related viruses managed to cross-infect. After that, the viruses would have quickly have evolved to their new hosts (which really are pretty damned closely related to the old hosts).

Why didn't it blow up in the heteros?

[swb]

Why didn't AIDS become as big in the hetero community -- or did it, and the media has never reported it that way? I know its a problem in Africa, but I'm most interested in the US.

Female-to-male spread harder? Lower frequency sex in heteros? Lower sex partner churn in heteros?

I came of age in the 1980s when AIDS was a big deal and frankly, almost never was it something I found my female partners to be concerned with. They worried about pregnancy, although even that was often not taken too seriously.

Re:Why didn't it blow up in the heteros?

[Oswald McWeany]

Why didn't AIDS become as big in the hetero community.

Really? Do you not know anything about the gay scene? I'll give you a clue, the amount of fucking is in the region of 10-100 times greater than in hetero land. That means contagions have a 10-100 times greater chance of spreading.

That doesn't tell the full story though. Yes, they have higher success rates at hooking up (straight men would too if women were as easy).

On top of that though, there was lack of condom usage several decades ago. Men can't get other men pregnant. There is also the nature of the sex- anal transmission is much higher than vaginal transmission. It's a lot harder to spread AIDs vaginally.

Another big factor in why it didn't spread as much in the heterosexual community: it's much harder for a woman to pass the disease to someone else than it is for a man. A man with the disease is much more likely to infect his partner than a woman with the disease is.

It's more complicated than JUST a number of partners thing (Although that obviously amplifies the problem).

Re:GRIDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

You tell me. Why you keep coming back?

Virtue signaler are the worst garbage. "Look at me; I disprove of political incorrect speech! I post from my account too! Please mod me up! LOL i am such a karma whore."

Delete you account and go back to tumblr.