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.
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.
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.
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.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.