Gaëtan Dugas (February 20, 1953 – March 30, 1984), a Canadian who worked for Air Canada as a flight attendant, was one of the first diagnosed AIDS patients. In March 1984, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study tracking the sexual liaisons and practices of gay and bisexual men in California, New York, and some other states found Dugas to be the center of a network of sexual partners, which led to him being dubbed "patient zero", although the idea that he initially brought HIV to North America was definitively disproven by researchers in May, 2016; their results were published in October, 2016. He is used as an example in epidemiology of an index case.