Gaëtan Dugas
A Canadian flight attendant whose posthumous portrayal as AIDS “Patient Zero” made him a scapegoat.
Gaëtan Dugas was born in Quebec City around 1952. He worked as a flight attendant for Air Canada and took part in the gay social worlds of cities across North America. In 1980 he was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, before AIDS had been recognised as a syndrome.
Dugas helped researchers trace links between early cases by providing information about his sexual partners. In the investigation he was identified with the letter O, indicating a case from outside California. That designation was later understood as the number zero.
After his death in 1984, Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On” (1987) helped popularise a damaging account of Dugas as the man who brought AIDS to North America. The “Patient Zero” story turned a complex epidemic into the supposed wrongdoing of one individual.
A genetic study published in 2016 examined historical blood samples, including Dugas’s. It found no biological or historical evidence that he was the primary US case, and showed that HIV had been circulating there during the 1970s. His story illustrates how a misleading label can turn participation in research into a source of lasting stigma.