New York Native

1980-1984: The Fog of Epidemiology

By: Charles Ortleb

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This is the first chapter of New York Native, Charles Ortleb's riveting history of the HHV-6, AIDS, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemics. Ortleb was the publisher and editor-in-chief of New York Native, the amazing newspaper that broke the biggest medical stories of the 20th century. Nobody in the world has done more than Ortleb to sound the alarm about all the diseases linked to HHV-6.

The first chapter of The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic Cover-up takes the reader into the offices of New York Native, a small newspaper in Manhattan with a mostly gay readership. The paper had barely begun its existence when the medical and scientific story of the century fell into its lap. Charles Ortleb describes what it was like the night the first story of what turned out to be AIDS broke in The New York Times. In a dark time of terror and confusion, he decided to make the New York Native the paper of record and conscience for the epidemic. And it did it at a time when many of his readers didn't want to hear anything about it. The reporting his paper did was so thorough that, in Rolling Stone, David Black said New York Native deserved a Pulitzer Prize. In this first chapter we learn about all the different causation theories that scientists came up with, including the compelling notion that AIDS had originated in sick pigs. As time went on, Ortleb's paper began to catch the Centers for Disease Control in a number of lies and as a result, the paper's reporting became more critical and investigative. Nobody expected a newspaper like New York Native to behave like Woodward and Bernstein. Ortleb's determination to get to the bottom of the story put him on a collision course with the medical and political establishment.

"A rollicking, fascinating and important memoir.” —Hillary Johnson, author of Osler's Web, Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic