A new hereditary study confirms that theories of the global epidemic of HIV and AIDS started in New York 10 years before doctors first noticed the disease.
According to the report from NBC, the epidemic HIV desease started in New York around 1970. The finding solves a 35-year-old mystery surrounding the origins of America’s outbreak, the first in the world to be noticed by doctors. The study also clears the name of Gaëtan Dugas, so-called “Patient Zero,” who had been wrongly blamed for bringing the virus to U.S. shores.
Mr. Dugas was once blamed for setting off the entire American AIDS epidemic, which traumatized the whole nation in the 1980s and has since killed more than 500,000 Americans. Other netizens even called him with the title "The Man Who Gave Us AIDS."
As reported by Andrew Griffin of Independent, the blame of Mr. Dugas all relates to one small typo in a paper by the US Centres for Disease Control. That typo made him appear to be the first person to have the disease and the person who brought it to the US where it would infect over a million people and have a lasting cultural impact.
According to The New York Times,Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, theorized a few cases were multiplied by unsterile conditions at a private blood-collecting company, Hemo-Caribbean, that opened in 1971 and exported 1,600 gallons of plasma to the United States monthly. It was conducted in Haiti. Note that Haiti was also a sex-tourism destination for gay men, another route the HIV could have taken to New York.
The blood samples analyzed in the new study were collected in 1978 and 1979 in New York City and San Francisco as part of an effort to make a Hepatitis B vaccine. Researchers stored almost 16,000 blood samples; nearly 7 percent of those from New York and 4 percent of those from California later turned out to be infected with H.I.V.
"We can date the jump into the U.S. in about 1970 and 1971. HIV had spread to a large number of people many years before AIDS was noticed," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and the lead author of the Nature paper
A team led by Worobey sequenced the genomes of the H.I.V. found in some of those samples and compared them with viral DNA in samples collected in the early 1980s from Haitians, Dominicans and others treated in American hospitals.
Africa has a dozen H.I.V. groups, and Haiti’s epidemic came from one of those. The New York samples all derive from one Haitian strain, and those from San Francisco are all so closely related that they probably all resulted from one person introducing one New York strain, Dr. Worobey said. This analysis also traced that it is around 1976.
