Patient 0

"Patient Zero" is the false claim that Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant, introduced HIV to the United States. The label grew out of a 1984 CDC cluster study, where he was coded "Patient O" for "Outside California," later misread as the number zero. Randy Shilts's 1987 book And the Band Played On popularized the idea and turned Dugas into a scapegoat. A 2016 study in Nature analyzed 1970s blood samples and showed HIV was circulating in New York City by around 1971, years before Dugas could have been responsible. The myth caused lasting harm by fueling stigma against gay men and distorting public understanding of how the epidemic actually spread.