AIDS origins (and how it jumped from Africa to US)

Barnes & Noble

Randy Shilts' book, And the Band Played On, which retraced the appearance of AIDS in the US, told a compellingly creepy tale about ultra-promiscuous Gaetan Dugas, a gay Canadian flight attendant, who was dubbed Patient Zero by the CDC, died in 1984, and supposedly infected dozens of the thousands of men he slept with, even after having been told by his doctors to knock it off.

In fact, the first confirmed HIV/AIDS victim in North America was "Robert R."  who died at 16 in May of 1969 after having experienced symptoms for three years.

A new book, The Origins of AIDS, by infectious disease specialist Dr. Jacques Pépin, of the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, thinks it happened via a plasma center and gay sex tourism, both in Haiti.

Donald G. McNeil of the New York Times summarized as follows:

     ...Now Dr. Pépin’s calculations get slightly more speculative.

     Group M of H.I.V.-1 is, in turn, broken into subgroups A through K.

     Haiti’s epidemic, like that of North America and Western Europe, is nearly all subgroup B. But subgroup B is so rare in central Africa that it causes less than 1 percent of cases.

     That suggests AIDS crossed the Atlantic in just one Haitian. Molecular clock dating indicates it reached Haiti roughly in 1966.

     Once again, Dr. Pépin argues that rapid expansion through sex alone is mathematically impossible and that there must have been an amplifier. He believes the culprit was a Port-au-Prince plasma center called Hemo-Caribbean that operated only from 1971 to 1972 and was known to have low hygiene standards.

     Plasma centers take blood, spin it and return the red cells. If new tubing isn’t used for each patient, infections spread. Sloppy plasma operations caused later H.I.V. outbreaks in Mexico, Spain and India and, most famously, in rural China, where 250,000 sellers were infected.

     Hemo-Caribbean’s co-owner was Luckner Cambronne, leader of the feared Tontons Macoutes secret police. Nicknamed the “Vampire of the Caribbean,” Mr. Cambronne, who died in 2006, bled 6,000 sellers who were paid as little as $3 a day and exported 1,600 gallons of plasma to the United States each month, according to an article in The New York Times.

     Haiti was also a prime destination for gay American sex tourists; the Spartacus travel guides described how much young men expected to be paid. By the early 1980s, subgroup B was killing both American homosexuals and hemophiliacs, suggesting it arrived via both routes. The modern history of AIDS had begun.