One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views
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How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
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“When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
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He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
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The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
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The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
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HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
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He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
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They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
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By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
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This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
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In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.