WI: HIV spreads earlier

What happens if an immunodeficiency virus makes the species jump from chimpanzees to humans earlier than IOTL and manages to spread throughout the world? IMO, the perhaps *most interesting* time to see it happen would be during the 1600s Atlantic Slave Trade, where a captured African carrying the disease is brought, along with the virus, to the Americas (preferably North America, where they will survive long enough for the disease to spread) and from there into the broader developing world trade networks? I also find it possible for the disease to spread on a slave ship, possibly by sexual contact if the victim is female and is assaulted by a crewman, otherwise via exposure between salt sores of the sort that seem likely to develop in the conditions of a slave ship. How fast does the disease spread? How does this impact the course of the 1600s, which already faced massive upheaval OTL in the form of the 30YW, Ming Collapse, etc? Afterwards?
 
Could it literally stop the Atlantic Slave Trade? AIDS could probably devastate North America. If it's linked to slave owners raping their slaves (and eventually spreading into the rest of the population) I can imagine the European Empires banning the slave trade to protect their colonies (and themselves)
 
Could it literally stop the Atlantic Slave Trade? AIDS could probably devastate North America. If it's linked to slave owners raping their slaves (and eventually spreading into the rest of the population) I can imagine the European Empires banning the slave trade to protect their colonies (and themselves)

Possibly but by that point it's already spread too far to be stopped. HIV will continue even if slavery doesn't.

Might widespread HIV even out the playing field, so to speak, between natives and Europeans, since the virus will cause the latter to lose their resistances?
 
Could it literally stop the Atlantic Slave Trade? AIDS could probably devastate North America. If it's linked to slave owners raping their slaves (and eventually spreading into the rest of the population) I can imagine the European Empires banning the slave trade to protect their colonies (and themselves)

Nothing stopped syphilis short of antibiotics despite the causes being well-known.
 
this is so much worse than that... human extinction is unlikely but possible

Eventually humans develop an immunity to AIDS. Some people (less than 1%) are immune to the AIDS virus. That percentage goes up over time as people die off. You might hit the 90% mark but it wouldn't kill everyone.
 
I'm going to post this, and then come back and add. I'm on my phone which is not conducive to typing large amounts of text.

this may actually be OTL. HIV jumped to humans and spread twice in the last hundred years or so. Once from chimps in central Africa, and once from monkeys in West Africa.
So in the 200,000 years modern humans have been around, statistically, it may have infected us some 4000 times.

The huge difference this time was modern transportation, allowing it to travel, and the increased promiscuity associated with the Sexual Revolution and the massive cultural breakdown of traditional cultures, eg migration to cities.

Without massively connected networks of sexual contact, HIV won't explode. Sure, it could easily get into the brothels of eg east Africa, and infect a number of Arab traders / slave traders. So what?

Sailors died. City dwellers died. Soldiers died. One more disease added to the mix isn't going to make that much difference.

Let's posit that it reaches the big cities of Europe, and becomes established, along with syphilis, gonnorhea, etc. So the rakes who patronise the stews regularly tend to died off mysteriously 10 to 20 years later of AIDS, rather than 30 to 40 years later of syphilis.
It might not even affect the life span of the prostitutes much, as most of them died before the HIV incubation period was over.
 
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Nothing stopped syphilis short of antibiotics despite the causes being well-known.
Yes, when syphilis spread through Europe. In this scenario, we have one outburst in eastern North America. If the way of transmission is understood quickly enough, it's possible that other areas of the world can get sort of quarantined - how much did syphilis spread to Asia IOTL?
 
I'm going to post this, and then come back and add. I'm on my phone which is not conducive to typing large amounts of text.

this may actually be OTL. HIV jumped to humans and spread twice in the last hundred years or so. Once from chimps in central Africa, and once from monkeys in West Africa.
So in the 200,000 years modern humans have been around, statistically, it may have infected us some 4000 times.

The huge difference this time was modern transportation, allowing it to travel, and the increased promiscuity associated with the Sexual Revolution and the massive cultural breakdown of traditional cultures, eg migration to cities.

Without massively connected networks of sexual contact, HIV won't explode. Sure, it could easily get into the brothels of eg east Africa, and infect a number of Arab traders / slave traders. So what?

Sailors died. City dwellers died. Soldiers died. One more disease added to the mix isn't going to make that much difference.

Let's posit that it reaches the big cities of Europe, and becomes established, along with syphilis, gonnorhea, etc. So the rakes who patronise the stews regularly tend to died off mysteriously 10 to 20 years later of AIDS, rather than 30 to 40 years later of syphilis.
It might not even affect the life span of the prostitutes much, as most of them died before the HIV incubation period was over.

The incubation time of HIV means that it has a chance to spread over the slower travel networks of the 1600s. Likely, about ~20 years after the first exposure, it'll hit hard, though given the fact that HIV spreads slowly I doubt it'll cause a pandemic on the lines of the black death or Spanish flu.

However, I do think that it'll be qualitatively different than "One more disease added to the mix". Unlike, say, Cholera, HIV directly weakens your ability to fight off other diseases, in an era when pathogen exposure was much higher than present due to less knowledge about sanitation. Now, the fact that it won't spread quickly means that it likely won't ever cause pandemics per se, but it will make future pandemics worse.

Furthermore, as shown by OTL, royal families tended to...have difficulty with STDs already; since HIV can't be detected until it's too late, this will likely increase. Therefore, royal lines throughout the world will be more "fragile" ITTL. Likewise, armies also had difficulties with STD prevention; in the early 1600s, the 30YW is prime condition for marauding armies to spread it across the continent (though, if soldiers are weakened, that may mitigate the worst of the conflict...).

Also, because of the combination of long dormancy period and fatality through secondary symptoms, I wouldn't be surprised if HIV throws early scientists of the trail of infectious disease for quite a long time...

In short, the world is likely less stable, more disease-prone, and maybe less advanced technologically/medicinally than OTL.
 
I'm going to post this, and then come back and add. I'm on my phone which is not conducive to typing large amounts of text.

this may actually be OTL. HIV jumped to humans and spread twice in the last hundred years or so. Once from chimps in central Africa, and once from monkeys in West Africa.
So in the 200,000 years modern humans have been around, statistically, it may have infected us some 4000 times.

The huge difference this time was modern transportation, allowing it to travel, and the increased promiscuity associated with the Sexual Revolution and the massive cultural breakdown of traditional cultures, eg migration to cities.

Without massively connected networks of sexual contact, HIV won't explode. Sure, it could easily get into the brothels of eg east Africa, and infect a number of Arab traders / slave traders. So what?

Sailors died. City dwellers died. Soldiers died. One more disease added to the mix isn't going to make that much difference.

Let's posit that it reaches the big cities of Europe, and becomes established, along with syphilis, gonnorhea, etc. So the rakes who patronise the stews regularly tend to died off mysteriously 10 to 20 years later of AIDS, rather than 30 to 40 years later of syphilis.
It might not even affect the life span of the prostitutes much, as most of them died before the HIV incubation period was over.
Well, isn't this why the OP posited that it would be spread by slave-owners? That's a pretty massively connected network of sexual contact, as you put it.
 
I won't claim an AIDS epidemic requires widespread, cheap contraception, as it's PROBABLY possible without it. But if people are having as much promiscuous sex as would foster such an epidemic, then absent contraception, the birthrate is going to be economically unsustainable.
 
You do realize that the birthrate in America was ridiculously high, right? If anything, the high American birthrates contributed to the country's economic success- the costs of child rearing weren't nearly as steep as today, and there certainly wasn't any danger of a Malthusian collapse. I doubt that promiscuous sex would really affect birth rates that were already in the range of 6-7 children per woman on average.
 
Most slave owners owned more than one slave, and they regularly bought and sold slaves from each other.

That and once they're infected, they could well infect other slaves themselves as well as their wives/mistresses. In the 17th century there's also other avenues for infection, of which I posit that bloodletting would be among the most substantial. If one infected person is bled by a particular barber their implements could spread the disease to their future patients. It wouldn't be impossible for the majority of a small town or a fair portion of a city to be infected by this vector.
 
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Also having aids is a very bad diseases and due to how long it takes to appear we could see a epidemic like the Black Death in death rate but much much longer time frame, which we’ll would cull the population by a large amount
 
More STDs (esp. mysterious and fatal ones)? More religious conservatism. There's some social networks with really monogamous habits, and they don't get hit. It's not individual habits that matter as much as the network as a whole.

Also, beards may be in, as abstaining from the barber might be a good idea too.

I like the bit about it killing off royal lines. A big part of the noticeable death rate will be in infant mortality.
 
More STDs (esp. mysterious and fatal ones)? More religious conservatism. There's some social networks with really monogamous habits, and they don't get hit. It's not individual habits that matter as much as the network as a whole.

Also, beards may be in, as abstaining from the barber might be a good idea too.

I like the bit about it killing off royal lines. A big part of the noticeable death rate will be in infant mortality.

I'm not sure that HIV/AIDS would be considered an STD per se, at least culturally, in this period. Between regular cuts whilst shaving and the fact that it was considered good medicine to cut into veins with a knife every once in a while, it might be seen as "blood-borne" rather than just a Venereal Disease. Furthermore the incubation period, lack of visible symptoms until late stages of AIDS, and general misunderstanding about medicine may mean that people do not pick up on it being a VD/STD for quite some time.
 
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