On the Media

The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Host Brooke Gladstone examines threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm

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Debunking the AIDS "Patient Zero" Myth


One of the most enduring myths of HIV/AIDS history has finally been laid to rest. The so-called "patient zero," a Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas, was once blamed for igniting the entire AIDS epidemic in America. Media outlets fixated on his sexual promiscuity; the New York Post called him "The Man Who Gave Us Aids."

But new research published in the journal Nature reexamined the original blood samples taken from Dugas in 1983 and found that the strain of the virus he was infected with was already present in the country years before Dugas frequented the gay scene in New York and San Francisco. Bob talks with Michael Worobey, evolutionary biologist and lead author of the Nature paper, about how the patient zero story is an ongoing black comedy of mischaracterization.


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 November 2, 2016  10m