July 27, 2005

The Fickle Finger of Dr. Blick

Thursday, July 28, 2005—Sorry, guys. Despite what you heard, they didn’t find “Patient Zero,” so you can’t all go home and stop worrying about the “superbug.” Connecticut doctor Gary Blick told the year’s biggest AIDS confab, the 3rd International AIDS Society (IAS), in Rio de Janeiro, that he’d finally fingered the infector of that New Yorker so much in the spotlight since February—the one with the multi-drug-resistant, fast-progressing strain of HIV. Seizing on the sizzle, the media swallowed—and spit back—Blick’s story whole. This much, at least, is true: The two had sex at a club in the city last October and both of their viruses are resistant to most drugs. But, according to the NYC health department and other savvy observers, their HIV strains are not identical and the evidence doesn’t yet explain where the freaky New York case came from (or where it’s going). In fact, we might even be looking at a so-called “dual infection"— in which different strains coexist, potentially making the virus more destructive. So much (so far) for the cloaked-superbug-villain theory.