A company called Hemo-Caribbean negotiated a ten-year contract with the Haitian Government’s Minister of Interior, Luckner Cambronne, leader of the feared Tonton Macoutes secret police and nicknamed the ‘Vampire of the Caribbean’.3 Hemo-Caribbean used a relatively new procedure, which involved the donor giving a litre of blood, from which the amber plasma was harvested out, and then the blood pumped back into the person who donated it. All this for a payment of $3, which could be boosted to $5, if the donor was willing to have a tetanus vaccination, which made their plasma more valuable because additional tetanus shots could then be harvested from the plasma. After this, their own blood was pumped back into them, meaning they could then go back and donate again and again in quick succession without becoming anaemic.
There was a catastrophic problem with this, however, which was that the blood of countless donors was inadvertently mixed together in the plasmapheresis machine before being pumped back into them, thus infecting potentially every donor – and therefore recipient – with any blood-borne virus the donors might be carrying . . . such as HIV.
But Hemo-Caribbean seemed perfectly happy with the manner in which the plasma was collected. In an interview with the New York Times on 28th January 1972, Joseph B. Gorinstein said of his procedures, with a somewhat chilling nonchalance, that the plasma his company processed was ‘a hell of a lot cleaner than that which comes from the slums of some American cities’.
It wasn’t until later in 1972 that President Richard Nixon asked for an investigation into the blood business in the US, but by that point, with no screening for HIV because it wasn’t on anyone’s radar, the virus was already circulating around Haiti and, most probably, it had already entered the US either in the infected plasma or via a single infected immigrant who had arrived in a large city such as New York or, more likely, Miami only 700 miles away.
This single migration of HIV from Haiti to the US is called the ‘pandemic clade’ by investigators and represents a key turning point in the history of the AIDS pandemic. It is called a single migration only when it successfully establishes itself. Individuals with HIV may have crossed into the US and infected several people but the lineage of infection burnt out. The single successful event is estimated to have happened between 1969 and 1972. This would fit the subsequent epidemiology of HIV in the US, as the first cases of AIDS were reported roughly ten years after HIV is thought to have entered the country from Haiti, the precise interval between infection with HIV followed by progression to AIDS and subsequent death.4 Just as it had before in the Congo, in the decades before mass travel (and colonial medical programmes using a hollow-bore needle), the virus would remain lurking for almost ten years before anyone noticed it.
The death of a teenage boy in St Louis in 1969 of an unspecified illness baffled doctors at Washington University, and suggested to some that the AIDS virus might have already been in the US several times before the epidemic of the 1980s kicked off. The 15-year-old African-American named only as Robert R., but subsequently identified as Robert Rayford, presented himself to a clinic in 1968 suffering from an assortment of ailments including swollen lymph nodes, swelling of the legs, lower torso and genitalia. For 15 months he was treated in three different hospitals but became increasingly exhausted, lost a dramatic amount of weight, and suffered severe chlamydia. None of those treating him in any of the hospitals could diagnose his illness. Eventually he died of bronchial pneumonia and an autopsy found he had Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) lesions throughout the soft tissues of his body, a hallmark we later became aware of AIDS infection.
It wasn’t until 1986 that doctors were able to perform specific tests on tissue samples from Robert Rayford. Two tests were conducted: blot tests of his serum, a precise test for AIDS virus antibodies, and also a test for the P24 antigen, a virus protein that gives further evidence of infection. Both tests came back positive but, crucially, it wasn’t the strain that became known in the late 1970s and which spread AIDS worldwide. Doctors remained baffled. Rayford had never had a blood transfusion, didn’t do drugs, had never left the area and no other cases had been reported in his vicinity. The general conclusion was that there must have been several different strains of HIV at low level already making incursions into different countries, including the US, and at some point one of these strains became established and spread the pandemic. It is possible that, as in Africa, other people in the US did have HIV and died from it at a much earlier date but that no one had ever connected these deaths to AIDS because no one was looking for a virus they didn’t know existed.5
Most of the evidence points to the fact that, although various strains of HIV might have already been in existence in the US or, indeed, other parts of the world before the 1970s, the most likely route is that the deadly HIV-1 came to America from Haiti via one migration between 1969 and 1972 and established a foothold within the country then subsequently spread imperceptibly. In the ensuing years, the virus followed certain paths of chance and opportunity in certain subcategories of the American population.
‘The virus reached hemophiliacs through the blood supply. It reached drug addicts through shared needles. It reached gay men – reached deeply and devastatingly into their circles of love and acquaintance – by sexual transmission,’ suggested David Quammen.6
For a dozen years or so it travelled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise; death lagged some distance behind. No one knew the cause, and no one associated the deaths.
At some point in the 1970s, someone would give the virus to a Canadian airline steward called Gaëtan Dugas. Then someone would pass it on to the Hollywood actor Rock Hudson.
And just over a decade after it arrived from Haiti, someone else would give it to Freddie Mercury.
6
On 24th May 2006 at Bonhams auction house in London, a three-minute reel of Super-8mm film came up for auction that attracted a considerable amount of global interest. Lot 474 dated from around 1965 and was significant as it featured rare and unpublished film footage of Freddie Bulsara at Isleworth Polytechnic.
The silent film, shot by one of Freddie’s friends, Brian Fanning, shows a group of six young men walking towards or away from the camera, standing in staged positions, and sitting on a park bench smoking or gesticulating towards the sky with their arms. Being silent adds to the eeriness. Dressed in a wine red blazer and white shirt with blue trousers, Freddie is conspicuous by his obvious shyness. Not once does he smile, leading one to speculate his protruding teeth are making him incredibly self-conscious. There is no sign of the showman he is set to become in later life although already his movements and gestures indicate a whimsical nature and an element of camp, particularly when he buries his chin in his shoulder with an embarrassed grin after unravelling his hands theatrically skywards.
Freddie attended the Polytechnic from 1964 to 1966 and in terms of getting him into Ealing School of Art it certainly served its purpose. He had already gained three O-levels in art, history and English and now had the crucial A-level in Art & Fashion. But it offered him more than just that: it gave him a greater exposure to fashion, to films, to the English pop culture of the time and, of course, to music.
The mid-1960s was a turning point for popular culture in the UK. At this time Britain’s baby boomers were coming of age and pop culture, art and politics came together to seismically change British society from the bottom up. For the first time, creativity looked to the masses rather than to the higher echelons for validation. The Beatles