“Patient zero” is a medical term that started as a misunderstanding. An early North American victim of aids was anonymised in some documents as “Patient O”. The individual in question, Gaëtan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant, was thought at the time to have been the point of origin of the North American aids epidemic. The misreading of O (for “Outside of California”) as 0 (ie, zero), though accidental to begin with, thus seemed propitious. In fact, Dugas was not the sole point of that epidemic’s origin. But the term stuck, and has spread. It has, indeed, spread beyond medicine to embrace another sort of plague—disinformation.
The Economist: Lithuanians are using software to fight back against fake news
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