Researchers Dispel HIV “Patient Zero” Myth

Scientific American reports:

HIV probably arrived in the U.S. around 1971—a decade before AIDS was recognized as a disease and a dozen years before scientists discovered the virus that causes it—according to a new analysis of viral genomes from New York City and San Francisco. The genetic evidence upends a longstanding myth that a French-Canadian flight attendant started the U.S. epidemic when he slept with men in California and New York in the early 1980s.

This revised timeline comes from a close examination of blood samples taken from men in the late 1970s for hepatitis B testing and that of the man blamed for being the U.S. epidemic’s “Patient Zero.” For this new work researchers managed to isolate HIV in eight of those 1970s blood samples and sequence the viruses’ genomes. The genetic diversity of the HIV samples from those early dates lays bare the fact that the virus had been circulating—and mutating—in the country throughout the 1970s. The team’s molecular clock work even suggests that the U.S. strain of the virus had hopped from Africa to the Caribbean by about 1967, moved to New York City by about 1971 and from there to San Francisco by about 1976.

There’s a lot more at the link. Perhaps most fascinating is the revelation that Patient Zero came by that name due to a typo. He was supposed to listed as Patient (letter) O, for “outside of California.”