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H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. Long Before ‘Patient Zero’

H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. Long Before ‘Patient Zero’
James Michael Nichols
By 

HuffPost Queer Voices Editor

In the tortuous mythology of the AIDS epidemic, one legend never seems to die: Patient Zero, a.k.a. Gaétan Dugas, a globe-trotting, sexually insatiable French Canadian flight attendant who supposedly picked up H.I.V. in Haiti or Africa and spread it to dozens, even hundreds, of men before his death in 1984.

Mr. Dugas was once blamed for setting off the entire American AIDS epidemic, which traumatized the nation in the 1980s and has since killed more than 500,000 Americans. The New York Post even described him with the headline “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS.”

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