Resources

Lessons

1. Lesson 1: Explaining Disease Origins and Causation

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   The first lesson provides an opportunity to compare attempts to understand and explain past outbreaks of disease in Western Europe with early American responses to AIDS.Close

2. Lesson 2: U.S. Groups, Individuals, and Behaviors

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   The second lesson examines how particular groups, individuals, and behaviors have been targeted in past responses to plague, syphilis, cholera, polio, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever.Close

3. Lesson 3: AIDS and Infectious Disease Epidemiology

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   The third lesson explores the early work of American epidemiologists who investigated the newly recognized syndrome. The lesson pays particular attention to the Los Angeles cluster study which, in its attempt to provide evidence to support the idea that AIDS was caused by a sexually transmissible agent, introduced the term “patient 0.”Close

4. Lesson 4: And the Band Played On: Randy Shilts’s History of the American AIDS Epidemic

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   This lesson focuses on the writing, promotion, and responses to the best-selling history of the American epidemic written by a gay San Francisco journalist, a good deal of which focused on his identification, characterization, and rechristening of the individual at the center of the CDC’s cluster study as “Patient Zero.”Close

5. Lesson 5: Responses to “Patient Zero”

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   The fifth lesson investigates the widely diverging responses to Shilts’s characterization of Gaétan Dugas as “Patient Zero.”Close

6. Lesson 6: New Patient Zeroes

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   The last lesson evaluates the idea’s legacy for the investigation of subsequent epidemics and its potential to obscure important determinants of health and sickness.Close

7. About the Author