WI: AIDS Not Associated with the LGBTQ Community

Problem with 'sharp doctor in Africa' is that health care sucks there. If millions of people are suffering from malaria and TB and lots of other diseases, and also malnutrition etc., AND have few medical records, it becomes much, much harder to find a rare or new disease, especially one that doesn't kill people directly (when there's so much other stuff going on).

In the US it was found because a doctor found a cluster of Karposi's Sarcoma, which normally is a really, really rare disease, and went looking. It was the good level of general healthcare in the US that allowed the signal to be visible above the noise of the general ill health.

Besides, the labs and testing facilities available in much of Africa are minimal in many places and overworked everywhere.
 
Sure it is quite possible. You had probably millions infected in Africa. You just need a sharp doctor in Africa. And since the American doctors had missed the disease for one or two decade, one more year is an easy POD.

The virus had escaped being missed in central Africa for decades, missed because it imitated extant local illnesses. it was apparently only starting to spread to southern Africa in the 1980s.
 
Problem with 'sharp doctor in Africa' is that health care sucks there. If millions of people are suffering from malaria and TB and lots of other diseases, and also malnutrition etc., AND have few medical records, it becomes much, much harder to find a rare or new disease, especially one that doesn't kill people directly (when there's so much other stuff going on).

In the US it was found because a doctor found a cluster of Karposi's Sarcoma, which normally is a really, really rare disease, and went looking. It was the good level of general healthcare in the US that allowed the signal to be visible above the noise of the general ill health.

Besides, the labs and testing facilities available in much of Africa are minimal in many places and overworked everywhere.

It is worth noting that Kaposi's is actualy a major cancr in central Africa. HIV-associated Kaposi's does differ, but apparently not enough to be noticed at the beginning.
 
Easy.

There is no LGBTQ+ community.

Instead, with a POD, the community is named BATH (Bisexual, Asexual, Transgender, Homosexual) and the AIDS/HIV epidemic still occurs in high proportions amongst the BATH community, but not the LGBTQ community since they don't exist in this alternate tl.
 
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