AIDS - the White Man's Story

In his awesome book, Spillover, David Quammen talks of the story of yet another famous zoonotic disease, AIDS. This is the history most of us know of how AIDS came to be. Gaëtan Dugas, a young Canadian flight attendant, was the notorious “Patient Zero”, the man who “carried the virus out of Africa and introduced it into the Western gay community”. His job was the catalyst that lit the fire:

“As a flight attendant, with almost cost-free privileges of personal travel, he flew often between major cities in North America… notching up (sexual) conquests, living the life of a sexually voracious gay man… He was handsome, sandy-haired, vain but charming.”

The man contributed to the idea of his outsized role in the spread of AIDS:

“Dugas himself reckoned that in the decade since becoming actively gay he had at least twenty-five hundred sexual partners.”

 

No wonder it’s easy to see Dugas as “Patient Zero”. But, as Quammen writes:

“What the word “Zero” belies, what the number “0” ignores, and what the central position of that one disk within the figure fails to acknowledge, is that Gaëtan Dugas didn’t conceive the AIDS virus himself.”

In other words:

“Everything comes from somewhere, and he (Dugas) got it from someone else.”

 

By the early 2000’s, AIDS researchers had found multiple HIV virus lineages. Two major groups, HIV-1 and HIV-2. Four sub-groups under HIV-1, and eight sub-groups under HIV-2. Twelve different variants. And here’s the kicker:

“Scientists think each of those twelve groups reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.”

In other words:

“HIV hasn’t happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times – a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.”

 

AIDS thus is a scary reminder of why so many believed the Next Big One was only a matter of time, long before COVID-19:

“(AIDS) wasn’t a highly improbable event… like a comet come knuckleballing across the infinitude of space to smack planet Earth and extinguish the dinosaurs. No. The arrival of HIV in human bloodstreams was, on the contrary, part of a small trend. Due to the nature of our interactions with African primates, it seems to occur pretty often.”

 

And the story of why AIDS which had stayed a “small trend”, albeit a repeating trend, limited to Africa, suddenly went global (and viral, pun intended) is infinitely more complex than the (in)famous story of Gaëtan Dugas.