Excuse the Type O

For decades, we’ve known that a French-Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas was Patient Zero; the person who first brought HIV/AIDS to the United States. And, all along, we’ve been wrong. As the author of a new study explains, “This individual was simply one of thousands infected before HIV/AIDS was recognized.” So how could we be so wrong for so long? It turns out that it all started with a typo. “Through a labeling error on Dugas’s case file, Patient O (the letter) became Patient 0 (zero).” And this all happened before the days of autocorrect errors and Internet memes; before wrongness really had a platform where it could live up to its full potential.