Thread by @Paracelsus1092

The Fourth H: HIV and Haiti

Haiti and the gay tourism industry occupies an important place in the story of how HIV left central Africa and spread around the world.

A Thread:

Haitians were identified in the early 80's as a major risk group for AIDS, along with heroin addicts, homosexuals and haemophiliacs - the four Hs. Thousands of Haitians had fled to Florida, promoting a backlash.

The discrimination measures enacted against Haitian immigrants became in part a concern over this mysterious disease, some argued it was voodoo related. Haitians successfully lobbied to be removed from the CDC's list of at-risk groups.

Haitians developed the argument that actually American gay tourists had brought HIV to Haiti, rather than vice versa. Indeed the gay tourism industry was well organised at this point, with tours leaving New York and San Francisco to specific hotels in Haiti.

The infamous 'patient zero' was among those travelling to Haiti and the scene in Port-au-Prince was so well developed they were exporting "attractive boys" back to the US.

The brutality inflicted by these 'tourists' towards local boys attracted the attention of the authorities, esp when "several youths had been hospitalised following sodomy injuries"

The Duvalier govt clamped down on foreign gay bar owners and made lists of undesirable tourists, going so far as to stop those who looked gay and to arrest all gay Haitians for six months imprisonment and six months rehabilitation

So did this mean that gay Americans had introduced HIV into Haiti? Analysis of the viral strains and sub-types suggested that Haitians carried HIV group M subtype B, which supported the idea that Haiti received the virus first.

Interestingly, subtype B is an exceptionally rare strain of the virus, which means that almost certainly only one Haitian carried it back from the Congo to Haiti and from there it spread to the US.

Astonishingly, this one individual somehow ended up passing on a virus which infected 8% of all Haitian mothers who were tested in the early 80's. How did that happen? Next time we'll look at the international blood trade...