A new study has debunked the theory that flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas was the source that started the HIV/Aids epidemic in the U.S. With the use of genes extracted from archived blood samples, scientists have proved the outbreak originated in the 70s in New York, and not the early 80s by Dugas.

He was long blamed for the mass pandemic that gripped the west as ‘patient zero’ or ‘patient o’. Dugas was vilified following a study on gay men in 1984, which wrongly identified him as the first person to be infected in the U.S.. Author Randy Shilts wrote in 1987 that Dugas played a key role in the spread of the virus, and described him as sexually promiscuous and irresponsible, while the media ruthlessly vilified him. Evidence studied by the journal Nature has shown that HIV had been present in North America up to a decade before cases were first looked into in 1981 in Los Angeles, and Dugas was one of many contemporary cases.

Dugas participated in the study that hoped to discover whether Aids was caused by a sexually transmitted agent, and he died of the disease in 1984. The original study by the US Centres of Disease Control and Prevention blamed Aids on the sexual transmission of 40 homosexual respondents. Dugas was called ‘Patient o’ because he was from outside California, where the epidemic was meant to have begun.  This was misread as ‘zero’, which saw him wrongly labelled as the first Aids patient.

The new study involved scientists from the UK, the U.S and Belgium, who developed a technique called ‘RNA jackhammering’ that allowed them to trace the history of the most common type of HIV in the west, HIV-1 group M subgroup B. These samples came from homosexual men in New York and San Francisco that were taken before Aids was first widely reported in 1981. This meant they could reconstruct genomes from original samples that opened up its genetic history to find its true source.

Using original studies and their new techniques, scientists say New York City is the “key turning point” for its emergence: they traced it jumping from non-human primates to humans in Africa, before spreading to Caribbean countries in the late 60s, jumping to New York in 1971 and then onto San Francisco by 1976.

“No-one should be blamed for the spread of a virus that no-one even knew about,” Michael Worobe, the study’s co-author from the University of Arizona said, according to the Guardian. “How the virus moved from the Caribbean to the U.S and New York City in the 1970s is an open question - it could have been a person of any nationality, it could have even been blood products.”

“This individual was simply one of thousands infected before HIV was recognised,” co-author Richard McKay, from the University of Cambridge, said of Dugas, according to the Telegraph.

“Our analysis shows that the outbreaks in California that first caused people to ring the alarm bells and led to the discovery of Aids were really just offshoots of the earlier outbreak in New York City,” added Worobey.

Today’s research means scientists believe the disease came to San Francisco in 1975, six years before cases of Aids were discovered in California in 1981, before it was initially paralleled with HIV in 1984.