Gaetan Dugas Quotes

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.

There is an unhelpful tendency to regard superspreaders – and events where superspreading has occurred – as anomalies out of the ordinary. This contributes relatively little to our understanding of infectious dynamics and is bound to exacerbate the stigmatisation of individuals, as it has e.g. during the early years of AIDS, when much sensationalistic and unjustified blame was laid at the feet of early HIV patient Gaetan Dugas (on which see McKay, 2014). Rather, superspreading is one 'tail' of a distribution prominent mainly because it is noticeable – statistical models predict that there are generally an equal number of 'greatly inferior spreaders' who are particularly ineffective in spreading the illness.