
HIV Patient Zero cleared by science - kungfudoi
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37767179
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flukus
> Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo was seen as the city that
> started the global pandemic. From there it spread to the Caribbean and the
> US around 1970.

I think that was the only new part of the story. The've known for a long time
that HIV existed before patient zero and that it was estimated to have crossed
to humans around 1900.

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NumberSix
Gaetan Dugas actually died in March 1984 before the retrovirus now known as
HIV was supposedly isolated. At the time AIDS was a clinical syndrome whose
cause was unknown.

The cluster study that fingered Dugas as Patient Zero was used to argue that
AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease rather than, for example, the results
of cumulative toxic effects of drug abuse among the victims, notably the use
of "poppers" by large fraction if not all of the original victims.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppers)

The study traced sexual contacts and was interpreted to show a sexually
transmitted disease that resulted in death in about 10 to 18 months after
transmission.

Dugas was said, not just in Shilts book, to have continued having unprotected
sex with other men despite having been warned by the researchers that he was
carrying an as yet unidentified super-killer sexually transmitted disease.

How true is this? Who knows, but it was widely repeated in documentaries and
other sources well before Shilts book. It seems to have been promoted by the
CDC.

In the subsequent three decades, the purported latent period between infection
and death of AIDS/HIV has been lengthened to at least ten years. The modern
theory of the disease, to the extent that one can pin it down, is grossly
inconsistent with the early studies and claims by the CDC.

In the mid 1980's, after HIV was proposed as the cause of AIDS, the government
did what one would expect. They infected about two hundred chimpanzees,
thought to be man's closest animal relative, with HIV, or more accurately
fluids thought to contain HIV. Of these, two have died of symptoms said to be
similar to AIDS.

[http://discovermagazine.com/2002/may/featchimp](http://discovermagazine.com/2002/may/featchimp)

One, known as Jerom, apparently came down with the symptoms spontaneously.

[http://www.releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/their-
stories/jerom](http://www.releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/their-stories/jerom)

The second was supposedly infected with Jerom's blood or fluids from him and
so is not a spontaneous case.

One out of two-hundred is 0.5 percent, about the incidence of AIDS in the
general human population.

Here is another article about the remarkable immunity of chimpanzees to HIV.

[http://www.mareonline.nl/artikel/1011/17/1401/](http://www.mareonline.nl/artikel/1011/17/1401/)

