Thread by @Telegraph

🔴 In October 1981, a man took his last short breaths at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.

Doctors noted his cause of death as a rare form of pneumonia.

But for 40 years neither he, nor the disease that truly killed him, have been publicly named

telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…

🔴For all this time, the 49-year-old has remained a medical mystery, referred to simply as ‘Patient Zero’.

"Now, we can finally call him by something else," writes Paul Brand

"His name was John Eaddie and he is believed to be the first person to have died with AIDS in Britain"

📅 Paul Brand has spent three months tracing his story for an ITV documentary, which will mark four decades of the AIDS epidemic in the UK.

"As a journalist, there has seldom been a tale that has consumed both my head and my heart quite like this one"

"Our starting point was an entry in The Lancet from December 1981, now widely agreed to be the first record of a patient to die of AIDS in the UK"

➡️ The doctors coldly noted that “he was homosexual” and had “travelled to the United States”

"By pulling together three vital pieces of information – the patient’s age, the hospital he died at and his suggested cause of death – we were able to begin trawling through thousands of death records to try and find him"

"Eventually, my producer came across a death certificate for John Eaddie, born on April 19, 1932 in Saltburn, Yorkshire"

The handwritten cause of death: pneumocystis pneumonia.

➡️ This was the only match.

"Days later I sat in the café two streets from where John had lived, as his friends arrived one by one. The weight of human history that they carried into the room with them was overwhelming"

"While the stigma of Aids means that many of those early patients were very deliberately forgotten, today we remember him"

🔓 This article is currently free to read in the UK

Read more about Paul's journey to find John's friends and relatives ⬇️
telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…