The first man to have aids Gaetan Dugas

The man who has been accused of sparking the AIDS epidemic for decades might not have had anything to do with the onset of the disease, a new study has found.

Gaetan Dugas, a Quebec-born flight attendant at Air Canada, was labeled as Patient Zero in a 1984 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Journalist Randy Shilts described Dugas as a promiscuous man who recklessly continued to have sex with other men despite knowing he was at risk of transmitting the virus in his 1987 book And The Band Played On.

But now, researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson have studied the history of the virus's mutations and found that the epidemic began before Dugas's time - and at a different place, Science reported.

Scientists compared a 1983 blood sample from Dugas with eight blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in the late 1970s.

They isolated the HIV and, thanks to a technique known as the molecular clock, created a 'family tree' of the virus's different versions throughout the years.

Dugas's version of the virus fell in the middle of the tree, Science wrote, not at the beginning - showing that Dugas did not bring the first case to the United States.

Instead, scientists say that the epidemic most likely began around 1970 in New York City and that the virus had probably come from Haiti or another Caribbean country.

Dugas was used as a scapegoat at the beginning of the epidemic, Dr Richard Elion told Vox.

Gregg Gonsalves, an HIV/AIDS activist, told the website: 'Patient Zero became a convenient symbol for a culture ready to panic about gay men and the microbes swirling around in their bodies.'

People Magazine singled out Dugas in 1987 as one of the 25 most intriguing people of the year, saying that his 'fierce sexual drive gave impetus to an epidemic that claimed his life and thousands more'.

That same year, Time Magazine spread a similar narrative about Dugas, calling Shilts's account of the epidemic 'a stunning book'.

The New York Post called Dugas 'The Man Who Gave Us Aids' in a headline, Science of Us reported.

Shilts's book, in which two doctors call Dugas a sociopath, attracted criticism later on for being speculative and relying too much on rumors, Dr Richard A McKay wrote in a 2014 study.

Dugas was born in Quebec City in 1952. He moved to Vancouver when he was 20 years old to learn English and get his dream job as a flight attendant.

He began working for Air Canada in 1974 and traveled often between Vancouver, Montreal, Halifax and Toronto. Dugas, who had 'several hundred partners each year' according to McKay, also spent time in New York in San Francisco.

He was diagnosed with Kaposi's Sarcoma, a type of cancer frequently found in AIDS patients, in 1980.

'With an awareness of the limits of contemporary knowledge about the condition, Dugas was one of many gay men of the time who viewed medical claims and advice with skepticism,' McKay wrote.

'Nonetheless, he had been very helpful with researchers from the CDC, providing them in 1982 with the best early set of records for contact tracing they could find—seventy-two names of his previous sexual contacts.'

Dugas died in Quebec City in 1984, at 31 years old.