Read more at: and worth perusing some of the comments from Guardian readers . . . here's one . . .Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west.
Using sophisticated genetic techniques, an international team of researchers have revealed that the virus emerged from a pre-existing epidemic in the Caribbean, arrived in New York by the early 1970s and then spread westwards across the US.
The research also confirms that Gaëtan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant named in 1987 by author Randy Shilts, was not the first person in the US to be infected, despite being dubbed “Patient zero” by a study of homosexual men with Aids in 1984. Analysis of his HIV genome shows that it was typical of strains of the virus within the US at the time and was not the root from which the virus diversified in North America.
It was a frightening time, wasn't it? And it crept in so silently. I worked in a restaurant in Bristol with a beautiful man who kept on getting flu and things he couldn't shake off, and every night before service he would call his mother and talk to her in Welsh and tell her he loved her. He was full of love, and looking for love, but then he got iller and iller, and it turned out he was the first man in the South West of Britain to die of AIDS.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... udy-proves