GaetanDugas

B. February 20, 1953 d. March 30, 1984 at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Quebec City.

Gaëtan Dugas, the Montréal Air Canada flight attendant who had been considered by some epidemiologists as PatientZero in the AIDS epidemic, based on a 1984 study published in The American Journal of Medicine (that theory has since been disputed and discredited by many other epidemiologists.)

He was dubbed PatientZero in Randy Shilts's book And the Band Played On, that is, a superspreader like Typhoid Mary because he willfully infected others. The book says he even taunted some men he had slept with by pointing to the sores on his arm and saying, 'gay cancer - maybe you'll get it.'"

Before he died of AIDS-related kidney failure in 1984, he was flown down to Altanta regularly for interviews with Centers for Disease Control (CDC) researchers in order to help understand early patterns in the transmission of the disease, detailing his many sexual contacts and thus helping reinforce the notion that an infectious agent was behind the then-mysterious so-called "gay cancer".

The best-known photograph of Dugas, right, was taken by Haligonian RandGaynor, was the subject of a lecture at the Saint Marys Univerisity in January 2006 by RobinMetcalfe.

HistoryProjectTodoList: connect Dugas' life to Halifax:

• where he lived,
• when,
• where he hung out,
• with whom, and
• if he was involved with community organizations,
• etc.