WI: Freddie Mercury gets AIDS as in OTL, but lives - more or less like Magic Johnson.

Is it even possible? Freddie got AIDS a few years earlier than Magic did, and a few years can make a hell of a difference when talking about a disease that, back then, was touted as the 20th century equivalent of the Black Death. But the impact on music and politics of one of the biggest rockstars in the world coming out about AIDS while still relatively healthy could be immense...
 
He would remain a famed entertainer and Queen would continue to put out material. But I never associated their work with politics, at least not internationally.
 

SsgtC

Banned
Here's the problem. Magic does not have AIDS. He has HIV. HIV can be treated to the point that it becomes undetectable in your blood. However, IIRC, once it progresses to full blown AIDS, there's really nothing that can be done. Freddie Mercury had AIDS. It takes HIV 5-10 years to progress to AIDS. Magic wasn't diagnosed as HIV Positive until 1991. Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. Meaning he likely contracted HIV between 1977 and 1982. So quite a bit more than "a couple years."
 
Here's the problem. Magic does not have AIDS. He has HIV. HIV can be treated to the point that it becomes undetectable in your blood. However, IIRC, once it progresses to full blown AIDS, there's really nothing that can be done. Freddie Mercury had AIDS. It takes HIV 5-10 years to progress to AIDS. Magic wasn't diagnosed as HIV Positive until 1991. Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. Meaning he likely contracted HIV between 1977 and 1982. So quite a bit more than "a couple years."
I knew a Zimbabwean who had AIDS (or properly Late Stage HIV). They were admitted to a hospital in Central London, where her brother came from from Zimbabwe wanting to take her home to die. The hospital said no let us treat her, and in a year the HIV had become undetectable in the blood and she was back to living a normal life. AIDS doesn't kill people it's the other infections and cancers that it allows that kills you, this lady was lucky as despite her CD count falling effectively to zero she had not got any other infections. Even AIDS can be controlled with anti retroviral drugs, though these drugs that work now came far to late for Faroukh Bulsara. He was a great loss to music, Queen were one of my favourite groups as a young teenager. I knew another Zimbabwean lady with AIDS however where the antiretroviral drugs didn't work and she died after about 6 months in hospital, when you get to Late Stage HIV treatment is not always effective.
 
Mercury got infected in the late 1970s or early 1980s—one recent study, noting symptoms of seroconversion/primary infection, suggests the summer of 1982—and began showing signs of advanced HIV infection aka AiDS (Kaposi's sarcoma) in 1986/1987.

It was a miracle he lived so long after developing AIDS without modern drug treatments. Five years! With the treatments of the time, he could not have lived longer.
 
With regards to Magic Johnson, it seems that his HIV infection was picked up as part of the regular screening. His infection might have been only months old. It would have been surprising, noting how it usually takes HIV a decade from initial infection to AIDS, for Magic Johnson to not make it to the mid-1990s and the advent of effective treatment.
 
Even if Mercury's HIV had been detected early enough, say the time range of 1977-1982, would the medications needed to treat it have been developed at the time?
 
Even if Mercury's HIV had been detected early enough, say the time range of 1977-1982, would the medications needed to treat it have been developed at the time?

There was AZT from the mid-1980s on, but as the Concorde studies of the early 1990s demonstrated AZT by itself was only enough to delay the progression towards AIDS by months, as the HIV in the patient's bloodstream simply mutated to minimize the effects of the drug. The paradigm now in place, of treatment with multiple drugs attacking HIV, using multiple different drugs each with different mechanisms of attacking the virus, could not have been supported by the drugs available at the time.

Freddie Mercury seems to have had no problems accessing treatment. He seems to have been well-connected, and he certainly was not lacking in the money needed. There was simply nothing that could be done.

I've touched upon this at an answer in Quora.

https://www.quora.com/What-if-Freddie-Mercury-was-still-alive-today/answer/Randy-McDonald

The only way for him to have been spared death from AIDS would have been for him to not be infected in the first place. He could do this--most queer men alive and active in the 1970s did not die of AIDS--but it would require significant changes, a break from his lifestyle. Was he in an authentically monogamous relationship, whether with an opposite-sex partner or a same-sex partner, one that lasted at least until the danger of AIDS became clear? Had he the chance to meet an early AIDS victim and be forewarned? If, as some suggest, he was only infected in the summer of 1982, there might possibly have been a window for him to be informed and to change his behaviour.

The only other way, I suppose, would have been for the field of antiretroviral medicine to be at least five years more advanced than OTL. I have no idea how this can be achieved, especially considering that the very idea of retroviruses capable of infecting human beings and causing disease was only discovered in the mid-1970s with HTLV.
 
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But . . .

if Freddie does live :)

Seattle grunge music, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sampling and/or building from a Boston song, and I think that being largely viewed as completely legitimate,

the continued development of Hip Hop,

Smashing Pumpkins, Counting Crows,

I think what’s called New Country,

and this is just the ‘90s! :cool:

So, I wonder how he interfaces, builds from, branches off, etc
 
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