Gaëtan Dugas died in 1984 without knowing that his name would spend nearly 30 years carrying a blame that was not his.
In 1981, a doctor in Los Angeles began seeing young, healthy men with an extremely rare form of pneumonia, one that only affects people with very weak immune systems. In New York, an uncommon skin cancer was appearing. That is how AIDS was discovered, and people soon began looking for someone to blame. The newspapers found him: Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant, “the man who brought us AIDS”.
It all came down to one letter. In a study of the first cases, researchers labeled him “patient O”, for “Outside California”. Someone read that O as a zero, and a bestselling book turned the mistake into a story. Decades later, scientists analyzed the virus in his blood and compared it with samples from the 70s: HIV had already been circulating in New York since around 1970, before he could have brought it there.
The true origin lies much further away. HIV is related to a virus found in chimpanzees in Central Africa, and it is believed to have passed to humans through contact with the blood of infected animals, possibly while hunting. Who the first person infected was remains a mystery. Simian viruses have jumped to humans at least 13 times, but only some managed to spread. This one changed history forever.