According to an article Tuesday in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Don Sapatkin, the story of the AIDS epidemic's "patient zero" was "sordid tabloid fare" created by a book publicist to hype the 1987 book And the Band Played On by the journalist Randy Shilts.
Whether or not this charge is fair, there is a bit more to the story.
Patient zero was identified by researchers as a man who had sex with multiple male partners on his travels across the U.S., inoculating them with HIV and accelerating the epidemic. Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, made headline news with his book by identifying patient zero as Gaëtan Dugas, a flight attendant from Quebec.
Now, a new book by a Philadelphia University professor, Phil Tiemeyer, claims that Shilts's publicist was "intentionally creating a scapegoat" to publicize Shilts's book. "The book mentioned the case on just a dozen or so of its 630 pages," Sapatkin writes. The claim seems to be based primarily on an interview with Shilts's editor, Michael Denneny, who tells Sapatkin, "We lowered ourselves to yellow journalism. My publicist told me, 'Sex death, glamour and, best of all, he is a foreigner.'" Patient zero, Sapatkin writes, "was an actual early case. He just wasn't the first case." (An interesting detail: The patient was originally identified as Patient O, for "Out of California." The "O" was misread as a zero.)
Denneny said that Shilts "hated the idea" of using Dugas to promote the book. "It took me almost a week to argue him into it." Shilts, Denneny said, wanted to emphasize the book's criticism of the Reagan administration's inaction on AIDS.
The irony here, as Sapatkin notes, is that Tiemeyer is now using patient zero to promote his book. "Tiemeyer had not planned to write a new book about Patient Zero. Indeed, that story takes up just two chapters (but is, ironically, his publicity pitch)," Sapatkin writes.
I wouldn't begrudge Tiemeyer his publicist's hype if he were not accusing somebody else of doing the same thing. Or if his claim about patient zero was original, which it apparently isn't. The supposed revelations about patient zero are not new. A quick stroll through the web, via Wikipedia, got me to this line, in a post at a British AIDS charity: "While Gaëtan Dugas was a real person who did eventually die of AIDS, the Patient Zero story was not much more than myth and scaremongering."
I wish Tiemeyer well with his book; but to use patient zero in precisely the way he criticizes Shilts for using him is what you might call sordid tabloid fare.
-Paul Raeburn
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