One of the most enduring myths in the history of HIV has finally been laid to rest.

So-called Patient Zero, the Canadian flight attendant universally blamed for introducing AIDS to North America,

the sexually insatiable vector, whom the New York Post called the man Who Gave Us AIDS, was simply not.

Last week, a paper in the journal Nature explained how by re-examining original blood samples taken from

Dugat in 1983, scientists determined that his strain of the virus had been present in the

hemisphere decades before and in the hemisphere decades before, and in the

country years before, Duga frequented the gay scene in New York and San Francisco.

Michael Warreby is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and the

lead author of the Nature paper, his research reveals that the patient

zero story is an ongoing black comedy of mischaracterization, including the premise that

Duga was uncommonly promiscuous. It was a cohort that had a large number of sexual partners on

average in the order of 225 per year.

I believe patient zero was 250.

But yeah, it's a sexually transmitted virus.

And a lot of the early cases were people who had a lot of sexual partners.

So not only wasn't he the original vector, his sexual habits weren't all that unusual, young gay man in the 80s. He got around.

Yeah, exactly. And so leaving aside the popular imagination version of him being the person who actually brought the virus to North America,

which is not the case.

Even if you look at the scientific understanding, he was positioned at the visual center

of this very important network of people who'd had sexual contact with each other

amongst the earliest handful of AIDS patients that the CDC

identified. Now, part of the reason that he ended up in that central position is because he was

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