PC: Earlier AIDS epidemic

WI "bush meat" was brought back to Europe by European explorers and plantation owners and missionaries?
WI bush meat became fashionable at high society dinners .... welcoming back explorers and traders?
WI the European upper-crust started dying of mysterious diseases?

The challenge is finding a way to preserve and transport all that bush meat before refrigeration became fashionable.

ITTL, a British food inspector told me that tons of bush meat land at Heathrow Airport every day. He confiscates bush meat every day, but Britain's borders are far too porous to stop the bush meat trade feeding recent immigrants from Africa.
 
If HIV comes to the USA in the early 1960s rather than the early 1970s as it did OTL (given the latency of disease which began to show up clinically in the late 1970s/early 1980s) you probably won't see a change in the sexual revolution of the 60s, because the other factors will be in play and by the time the disease becomes known it won't reverse completely. While the medical technology will be behind the OTL situation it won't be as bad as late 40s/early 50s. One thing that could be a complete disaster is the Vietnam War. With the war going on there will be a lot of blood and blood products being used. You could see HIV getting in to the blood system in a much more widespread way than OTL and ending up with a lot of Vietnam wounded becoming HIV+ - this could add a huge stigma to all Vietnam vets over and above the issues faced OTL.
 
WI "bush meat" was brought back to Europe by European explorers and plantation owners and missionaries?
WI bush meat became fashionable at high society dinners .... welcoming back explorers and traders?
WI the European upper-crust started dying of mysterious diseases?

The challenge is finding a way to preserve and transport all that bush meat before refrigeration became fashionable.

ITTL, a British food inspector told me that tons of bush meat land at Heathrow Airport every day. He confiscates bush meat every day, but Britain's borders are far too porous to stop the bush meat trade feeding recent immigrants from Africa.
Curious... how are Britain's borders porous? Are there Frenchmen swimming the Channel every day?
 
If HIV comes to the USA in the early 1960s rather than the early 1970s as it did OTL (given the latency of disease which began to show up clinically in the late 1970s/early 1980s) you probably won't see a change in the sexual revolution of the 60s, because the other factors will be in play and by the time the disease becomes known it won't reverse completely. While the medical technology will be behind the OTL situation it won't be as bad as late 40s/early 50s. One thing that could be a complete disaster is the Vietnam War. With the war going on there will be a lot of blood and blood products being used. You could see HIV getting in to the blood system in a much more widespread way than OTL and ending up with a lot of Vietnam wounded becoming HIV+ - this could add a huge stigma to all Vietnam vets over and above the issues faced OTL.

It would be comparable to that of non-A, non-B hepatitis, the term used by doctors in the mid-20th century to describe cases of hepatitis with no detectable hepatitis infection. Most of these were cases of hepatitis C.

In the case of HIV, things would be worse. For starters, HIV would be a new disease with no precedents. Retroviruses were known from the early 20th century, but it was only with the 1970s with the work of (among others) Robert Gallo that the idea that retroviruses could affect humans was accepted. There would be no way to test blood products for HIV. The best they could do, absent an HIV test, would be to test for diseases communicated in similar ways to HIV like hepatitis A and B, but that's hardly reliable. What is reliable is the ability of blood products to infect recipients with HIV: More than 90% of such transfusions will transmit the virus.
 
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