The Cell That Started a PandemicThis Radiolab podcast tells the story of how the HIV/AIDS epidemic began: the ultimate story of patient zero, a very recent event that still hurts and is still bleeding. Carl Zimmer, the guest speaker on this show, says that in 1981 doctors described for the first time a new disease, a new syndrome that mainly affected homosexual men. Young men in Los Angeles were dying and the number of cases was growing faster and faster. The number of deaths increased from eighty to six hundred and twenty-five in the first few months alone. After the first cases in Los Angeles, AIDS was declared one of the deadliest pandemics the world had ever seen after the plague of the Middle Ages. Another guest speaker and guide in this podcast is David Quammen. He talks about how epidemiologists were trying to figure out what this new disease was and how they thought it might be a sexually transmitted disease. So, the CDC launched the study with a group of around thirty patients from New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to see who had had sexual contact with whom. They conducted a series of interviews: “Please name everyone you have had sex with.” After these investigations, the CDC finally released the results in the form of a diagram, like a network with circles representing patients and lines representing sexual contact. In each patient, each circle was numbered so that they could tell who was who. They noticed: New York seven, Los Angeles twelve, etc... and soon they noticed a common denominator in this immense spider's web of connections. A small circle numbered zero: PATIENT ZERO. This was the first time they used the term patient zero. In 1988, a journalist named Randy Schultz......in the middle of the newspaper......accused of being patient zero and the one who deliberately and knowingly infected up to 250 men a year on both sides of the Atlantic was just one of many erroneous hypotheses formulated in the search for the origin of the HIV/AIDS virus. The fact that he single-handedly triggered the epidemic is today largely discredited by most scientists. Over time, computer models estimated that the first human infection occurred around 1930, about 20 years from now. The first known infection in an identified human was in 1959 and was discovered in a plasma sample taken from an adult male living in the Belgian Congo. Many hypotheses have been put forward and a human eating a chimpanzee seems to be the most likely form of the infection. Works cited1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/169885-aids/