WI HIV/Aids appeared in the late 19th century?

If the widespread spread of AIDS/HIV both developed and became public knowledge a century earlier?
 
I don't think people would notice it as dramatically as some assume. Especially when there were all sorts of diseases running rampant in the cesspits people called cities, so your AIDS wouldn't progress to the point you died of some rare illness, you'd just die of one of the many common ones instead. They might not even notice the effects in Africa considering colonialism. Outbreak of AIDS beyond Africa is easier of course with a Scramble for Africa.

But eventually Europeans would know something's up by the increasing death rates, which seem to have a sexually-transmitted nature to them (prostitutes, etc. will get it first) and some link to Africa (people who have been to Africa and those who have been around those who have been to Africa).
 
Moral crusaders could have a field day if the link to sex workers is uncovered. Imagine cities expelling all of their prostitutes--or anyone suspected of being a prostitute.
 
I honestly think the west may not even notice it for quite a while, the life expectancy in cities wasn't that great until deep into the 19th century. I'd expect a new round of religious fervor though once a bit of a correlation was developed where the stodgy religious people who weren't screwing around were the ones who were less affected than everyone else.
 
Cecil Rhodes might contract it ITTL given his supposed preferences, which could have major effects on Southern Africa.
 
I don't think people would notice it as dramatically as some assume. Especially when there were all sorts of diseases running rampant in the cesspits people called cities, so your AIDS wouldn't progress to the point you died of some rare illness, you'd just die of one of the many common ones instead. They might not even notice the effects in Africa considering colonialism. Outbreak of AIDS beyond Africa is easier of course with a Scramble for Africa.

But eventually Europeans would know something's up by the increasing death rates, which seem to have a sexually-transmitted nature to them (prostitutes, etc. will get it first) and some link to Africa (people who have been to Africa and those who have been around those who have been to Africa).

Correct me if I'm wrong but in the initial outbreak of aids didn't people almost drop like flies to put it bluntly? I think in the early 80's at least you'd sometimes have months between diagnosis and death.

It wasn't until recently and the powerful anti-viral drugs that people can live for years now with HIV.
 

JamesG

Donor
Correct me if I'm wrong but in the initial outbreak of aids didn't people almost drop like flies to put it bluntly? I think in the early 80's at least you'd sometimes have months between diagnosis and death.

It wasn't until recently and the powerful anti-viral drugs that people can live for years now with HIV.

It's not about how long they live, but what actually kills them. HIV/AIDS isn't actually fatal per se, it just deactivates your immune system and allows other diseases, diseases that would be normally be easily fought off, to thrive and kill you. So sepsis, or typhus, or cholera, or any of the many, many diseases present in 19th century cities (as @metalinvader665 and @The Gunslinger pointed out) would kill a person with AIDS and no one would know that it was any different to those people without AIDS who died of the same diseases. For a long time the biggest proximal cause of death in AIDS patients was pneumonia, which was also pretty deadly to everyone else prior to antibiotics.
 
It's not about how long they live, but what actually kills them. HIV/AIDS isn't actually fatal per se, it just deactivates your immune system and allows other diseases, diseases that would be normally be easily fought off, to thrive and kill you. So sepsis, or typhus, or cholera, or any of the many, many diseases present in 19th century cities (as @metalinvader665 and @The Gunslinger pointed out) would kill a person with AIDS and no one would know that it was any different to those people without AIDS who died of the same diseases. For a long time the biggest proximal cause of death in AIDS patients was pneumonia, which was also pretty deadly to everyone else prior to antibiotics.

Modern medicine allows a lot of AIDS victims to survive what would have wiped them out a century and a half ago. It might get to the point where it actually burns itself out in a lot of places simply because of the higher mortality rate. A bad cholera epidemic would cut a bloody swathe through a city leaving it largely AIDS free for a few years. Pretty bleak but not the worst.

Sadly, the group that never caught a single break would be the group that it would probably hit the hardest... the natives.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Correct me if I'm wrong but in the initial outbreak of aids didn't people almost drop like flies to put it bluntly? I think in the early 80's at least you'd sometimes have months between diagnosis and death.

It wasn't until recently and the powerful anti-viral drugs that people can live for years now with HIV.

7 years or so between infection and death.
 
This was a topic in one of my TL's. I had an Aids-like and an Ebola-like virus coming out of Africa in the 1750's. This effectively eliminated the slave trade as the diseases would wipe out whole plantations (ebola fast as my disease would spread in unsanitary, hot conditions, and Aids slower but would infect people via the lack of stabile family units).

I conjectured that the global economy would be hurt via the heavier than average infection rates of sailors, thus grinding trade to a halt.

I think religion would make a comeback (18th century was not a religious age) by simple Darwinism: those who practiced monogamy would not be infected with Aids, thus they would survive. Indeed, there may even be a rise in birthrates if it causes more people to marry or marry earlier if one couldn't get one's rocks off otherwise. In the 19th century, spinsterism was common in Britain.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but in the initial outbreak of aids didn't people almost drop like flies to put it bluntly? I think in the early 80's at least you'd sometimes have months between diagnosis and death.
That was more because people were just learning what AIDS was and were diagnosing people who actually had quite advanced infections. The evidence is that HIV was spreading outside of Africa by the 1960s, for example with the case of Arvid Noe, but it still took a good decade and a half for it to proceed from infection to death from AIDS. Even without antiretroviral drugs, HIV is a slow disease, not a fast one.

Speaking to the WI itself, current models for the development of HIV suggest that the reason for it was, to put it bluntly, that there was a hell of a lot of prostitution going on in African cities around the turn of the century, leading to the spread of other STDs that, in turn, allowed SIV infections to spread from person to person until it evolved into HIV. That means that HIV is unlikely to develop significantly earlier without major unrelated changes, since the beginning of the European colonialism that enabled such large cities to exist and made it so that they had a highly skewed sex ratio (hence much prostitution) was the product of unrelated scientific advances. At most, again without major larger-scale changes, I could see it emerging to a major extent a few decades earlier if the development of the Congo is advanced a bit and it ends up interacting more with the outside world.
 
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