AIDS Was Already Here in 1971
Scientists are rewriting the history of an epidemic.
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The problem with providing a “rough, first-draft of history” is that so few people ever see the later drafts.
And so it goes with Gaétan Dugas, an Air Canada flight attendant who died in 1984 and soon thereafter was identified by the media as “Patient Zero” in the North American HIV/AIDS epidemic. Journalist Randy Shilts cast Dugas as such in his 1987 book, And the Band Played On; although other reports had avoided the mischaracterization, the moniker stuck.