Gaetan Dugas,  a French-Canadian flight attendant became notorious as the alleged patient zero for AIDS.  A study published in the American Journal of Medicine in 1984 traced many of New York City’s early HIV infections to an unnamed infected homosexual male flight attendant. Epidemiologists hypothesized that Dugas had carried the virus out of Africa and introduced it into the North Western gay community.

Dugas was also featured prominently in Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On, which documented the outbreak of AIDS in the United States. Shilts portrayed Gaëtan Dugas as having almost sociopathic behavior, by allegedly intentionally infecting, or at least recklessly endangering, others with the virus. 

For the next 40 year he would be vilified as Patient Zero, the man who gave us AIDS.

You can watch the full documentary Killing Patient Zero below:

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