Gaëtan Dugas
(February 20, 1953 - March 30, 1984) Canada

Airline attendant - Patient 0

Montréal airline attendant who worked for Air Canada; 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".

He had been considered by some epidemiologists as "Patient Zero" 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):

"Gaëtan Dugas, the gay airline attendant blamed for much of the early spread of AIDS in North America who was dubbed Patient Zero in Randy Shilts's book And the Band Played On, would be considered 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.'"

Panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Source: http://home.cfl.rr.com/atbpo/