A BRIEF HISTORY OF AIDS

In his book And The Band Played On, the reporter Randy Shilts (see card 103) presented a theory, based on epidemiological studies by the CDC (see card 92), that dramatized the "Patient Zero model" of AIDS transmission from Africa to Europe and America:

In 1977, Dr. Grethe Rask, a Danish surgeon who lived in Zaire, died from an unknown illness characterized by weight loss, swollen glands, and opportunistic infections. Rask was once thought to have been the first European to contract AIDS, but later research into others who died after sojourning in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) have disclosed even earlier HIV-positive blood samples. In 1978 a woman from Zaire flew her sick child to Belgium for treatment; the child died. That same year a Portuguese cab driver in Paris, who had travelled in Zaire, came down with the mysterious disease. By the time he died in 1980, many cases of the unknown ailment had been logged in Paris among those who had lived in Zaire or Haiti. Some of these people were, coïncidentally, gay.

In 1979 Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia (see card 72) began to appear in American and European gay men, among them Gaetan Dugas, a French Canadian airline steward whose job took him to Paris and the U.S., and who found sex part-

ners at gay bathhouses (see reverse of this card). A 1982 CDC contact-tracing of "Gay-Related Immune Deficiency," as it was then called, revealed many cases among those who had had sex with Dugas or his partners. Whether or not Dugas, dubbed "Patient Zero," was really "the man who spread AIDS to America," by the time he died in 1984, more than 3,500 U.S. cases had been noted. Next Card 62: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES OF AIDS: Biowarfare or Vaccine Error

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AIDS