What a relief that the late Gaetan Dugas has been exonerated as we now know that HIV came to the US in a Haitian instead of a Canadian. This 'origins of AIDS' research is, in his view, a waste of time. It encourages stigma and discrimination.

Did HIV come from Thailand to Myanmar or from Myanmar to Thailand. Who cares?

[him] moderator

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AIDS study spurs Haitian outrage: A new study asserts HIV/AIDS migrated to the United States from Haiti in 1969; but Haitians claim a long-standing prejudice.
http://webboard.aegis.org/WB/?boardID=2/read?6370,9

AIDS study spurs Haitian outrage: A new study asserts HIV/AIDS migrated to the
United States from Haiti in 1969; but Haitians claim a long-standing prejudice.

Miami Herald - October 31, 2007
Fred Tasker and Jacqueline Charles, ftasker@MiamiHerald.com  
http://www.aegis.org/news/mh/2007/MH071005.html

A new scientific finding that AIDS came to the United States from Africa via Haiti,
probably arriving in Miami as early as 1969, stoked controversy among researchers
and Haitians on Tuesday -- reopening deep wounds over the medical community's
role in perpetuating a stigma against people from the island.

Published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the
study aims to better explain the origin of AIDS, whose history involves a virus
with a sketchy story line that began in Africa in the 1930s and emerged in Los
Angeles in 1981.  

The findings were based, in part, on blood samples taken from about 20 Haitian
patients at Jackson Memorial Hospital as early as 1979. The samples were frozen,
stored at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and reanalyzed
by the study's authors, including a researcher at the University of Miami.  

"We were seeing patients at Jackson Memorial with what we now call AIDS, and at
the time we didn't even know it," said Dr. Arthur Pitchenik, co-author of the
study and a professor of medicine at the University of Miami Medical School. "I
started seeing Haitian immigrant patients with TB. They would get better from the
TB only to die three to six months later from what we now call AIDS."  

Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University
of California, Los Angeles, and one of the original discoverers of AIDS, said the
analysis placed the HIV virus that causes it in the United States nearly a decade
earlier than previously believed.  

"It's pretty clear evidence for Haiti as a stepping-stone," he said. "The suggestion
that the infection was further below our radar than I'd previously suspected is
kind of unnerving."  

"This is very credible work," added Dr. Margaret Fischl, a pioneering UM AIDS
researcher. "Their approach is the way it should be done. Some of my colleagues
think this is really remarkable work."  

The findings drew immediate anger from Miami's Haitian community and raised
concerns among some AIDS scientists, as well.  

"People are going crazy," said Dr. Laurinus Pierre, executive director of the
Center for Haitian Studies in Little Haiti. Pierre said he has fought stigmas
against Haitians from the first days of AIDS, in which researchers blamed the
epidemic on the "Four Hs" -- homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin
addicts.  

In February 1990, the Food and Drug Administration barred Haitians from donating
blood in the United States, a policy that ignited scores of protests and highly
publicized boycotts of blood drives. By December 1990, the FDA had scrapped its
policy and developed a more rigorous screening of all blood donors.  

To many, the policy pushed an already taboo subject in the Haitian community deeper
in the shadows and discouraged many from seeking treatment, a phenomenon some say
the latest findings could cause to happen again.  

"This does a disservice to the Haitian community, who feel like they already went
through this 20 years ago," said Dr. Paul Farmer, professor of medical anthropology
at Harvard University and a founder of Partners in Health, an international
research and aid organization active in fighting AIDS in Haiti. "This is very slender
evidence on which to base such a grand claim."  

"I don't think this is very helpful," said Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, a professor of
medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York. "People
love to play history, and it would be great to figure out who Patient Zero was.
But there are doubts."  

The study's lead author, Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary
biologist, defended his methodology Tuesday and denied any disservice to the
Haitian community.  

Worobey and his co-authors analyzed the frozen blood samples from about 20 of
Pitchenik's Haitian patients at Jackson from the late '70s and early '80s. They
set up a medical timeline that they say indicates the HIV virus arrived in Haiti
in 1966 and in Miami by 1969.  

Worobey said he estimated the timing of the virus' arrival by taking samples of
the virus from the late 1970s to 2000. By knowing the rate at which the viruses
mutate, he said he was able to create a picture of what the virus looked like in
1969. And by comparing viruses from the United States and Haiti during this time,
he could deduce when the virus arrived in the States.  

"It's a common technique used in genetic analysis and human evolution," Worobey
said Tuesday.  

The study concludes that AIDS arrived in Haiti after Haitians went to the Democratic
Republic of Congo as workers after that country won independence in 1960.  

It debunks the original "Patient Zero" theory that said the HIV virus came to Los
Angeles via a gay Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas. That theory was
created by Dr. William Darrow and others at the CDC and turned into the 1987 book
And the Band Played On, by journalist Randy Shilts. Darrow later repudiated his
own study.  

Pitchenik said he realized this week's study would be controversial in the Haitian
community.  

"I want to stress that this has nothing to do with race or sex or color of skin,
and we should not stigmatize any particular group," he said.  

"It's not whether you're Haitian or homosexual. It's the high-risk behavior you
engage in. Whether you have unprotected sex, whether you're a drug user sharing
needles."  

In Haiti, where 6 percent of the population was HIV-infected in 2003, the situation
has improved, with HIV rates dropping to 2 percent by 2006, the CDC says.