The seriousness of the alert was bolstered by the stature of the doctors behind it, some of whom were among the most respected in AIDS research. Ho, Time magazine's 1996 Man of the Year for his AIDS work, lent a stamp of scientific certainty.
The February announcement included caveats about assuming too much from a single case. But scientific uncertainty can be a hard sell to the media, and the event seemed suffused with the subtext that this could be a turning point in the epidemic.
Hundreds of articles and broadcasts followed. Some took a hysterical tone -- perhaps an overreaction by media outlets that were criticized for ignoring early cases of AIDS more than 20 years ago.
"New AIDS Super Bug -- Nightmare Strain Shows Up in City," trumpeted the New York Post. "New AIDS Peril Puts America on High Alert" was how the Hindu, one of India's large national newspapers, played the story. The New York Times headlined one of its several stories: "Chilled by Findings, Investigators Dreaded the Mounting Evidence."
The problem, however, was that for many experienced AIDS workers, none of the conditions was new or particularly rare.
Dr. Douglas Richman, director of the Center for AIDS Research at UC San Diego, said resistance to three classes of AIDS drugs was relatively common.
"Rapid progression occurs in a subset of people," said Richman, lead author of a study that showed widespread drug resistance similar to that of the New York patient's. "High rates of promiscuity among men who have sex with men, especially those who abuse methamphetamines, is frighteningly high."
"I didn't see this as a new, master virus that posed a threat of a new epidemic," Richman said.
Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, said the New York officials might have jumped to the conclusion that a single virulent infection would be easily transmitted.
The infection might say more about the individual's susceptibility to the virus than about the virus' ability to spread easily.
Canadian researchers Dr. Julio Montaner and Richard Harrigan at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS detected two similar cases in 2001, and those patients apparently did not pass along the virus.
"It wasn't clear that there was a real public health benefit from the way the announcement was made, as opposed to investigating more details in advance," said Dr. Paul Volberding, director of the Center for AIDS Research at UC San Francisco.
