HIV Patient Zero cleared by science

> Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo was seen as the city that started the global pandemic. From there it spread to the Caribbean and the US around 1970.

I think that was the only new part of the story. The've known for a long time that HIV existed before patient zero and that it was estimated to have crossed to humans around 1900.

Gaetan Dugas actually died in March 1984 before the retrovirus now known as HIV was supposedly isolated. At the time AIDS was a clinical syndrome whose cause was unknown.

The cluster study that fingered Dugas as Patient Zero was used to argue that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease rather than, for example, the results of cumulative toxic effects of drug abuse among the victims, notably the use of "poppers" by large fraction if not all of the original victims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppers

The study traced sexual contacts and was interpreted to show a sexually transmitted disease that resulted in death in about 10 to 18 months after transmission.

Dugas was said, not just in Shilts book, to have continued having unprotected sex with other men despite having been warned by the researchers that he was carrying an as yet unidentified super-killer sexually transmitted disease.

How true is this? Who knows, but it was widely repeated in documentaries and other sources well before Shilts book. It seems to have been promoted by the CDC.

In the subsequent three decades, the purported latent period between infection and death of AIDS/HIV has been lengthened to at least ten years. The modern theory of the disease, to the extent that one can pin it down, is grossly inconsistent with the early studies and claims by the CDC.

In the mid 1980's, after HIV was proposed as the cause of AIDS, the government did what one would expect. They infected about two hundred chimpanzees, thought to be man's closest animal relative, with HIV, or more accurately fluids thought to contain HIV. Of these, two have died of symptoms said to be similar to AIDS.

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/may/featchimp

One, known as Jerom, apparently came down with the symptoms spontaneously.

http://www.releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/their-stories/jerom

The second was supposedly infected with Jerom's blood or fluids from him and so is not a spontaneous case.

One out of two-hundred is 0.5 percent, about the incidence of AIDS in the general human population.

Here is another article about the remarkable immunity of chimpanzees to HIV.

http://www.mareonline.nl/artikel/1011/17/1401/