The search for a ``Patient zero``--popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic--has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades.
McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and inte.
How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero , Richard A.
Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the 1980s.
The search for a ``Patient zero``--popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic--has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades