Roots of AIDS in 1970s N.Y.

THE AIDS EPIDEMIC in the U.S. originated in New York — and as early as 1970, according to a groundbreaking new study.

The research backs up the long-held belief in the scientific community that the virus arrived roughly a decade before the first U.S. AIDS cases were identified in Los Angeles in 1981.

“Our analysis shows that the outbreaks in California that first caused people to ring the alarm bells and led to the discovery of AIDS were really just offshoots of the earlier outbreak in New York City,” said Michael Worobey, the evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study.

Researchers found that the HIV virus first jumped from the Caribbean to New York City around 1970, triggering the North American epidemic.

The new research, published in the journal Nature, also exonerates Gaëtan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant who became vilified as “Patient Zero.”

An estimated 700,000 people in the U.S. have died from the disease.

Using sophisticated genetic techniques, Worobey and his colleagues painstaking pieced together the entire genetic sequence of the HIV virus from archived blood samples.

The team traced genetic changes in the samples, allowing them to essentially build a family tree of the virus. “What we’ve done here is tried to get at the origins of the first cases of AIDS that were ever noticed,” Worobey said.

He believes a chimpanzee first infected a human in Africa in the early 20th century. The virus that caused the U.S. epidemic emerged from Africa in the mid- to late 1960s, and caused an outbreak in Haiti and other Caribbean countries.

In 1970 or 1971, the strain hopped from Haiti to New York, making the city an epicenter of transmission, Worobey said. The virus spread to a large number of people “many years before AIDS was noticed,” he said.

The team used the same approach to extract the full HIV genetic code from Dugas, who was identified as “Patient Zero” in Randy Shilts’ best-seller “And the Band Played On.”

Shilts, who wrote his book after Dugas died, identified him as playing a key role in spreading the virus. The study, however, found no biological evidence suggesting Dugas was the primary cause of the epidemic in North America.

“This individual was simply one of thousands infected before HIV was recognized,” study coauthor Richard McKaysaid.