WI the AIDS epidemic was brought to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave trade?

It's believed AIDS spread to humans from bush meat consumption in Africa. What if that disease had emerge a few centuries earlier and was brought over to the Americas among the millions of imported Africans.

How would this have impacted the slave trade and life as a whole in the western hemisphere?
 
AIDS did not spread to man until the first decades of the 20th century, this is impossible if you limit yourself to AIDS.

Could be possible with another STD with immunodeficiency syndromes though.
 
AIDS did not spread to man until the first decades of the 20th century, this is impossible if you limit yourself to AIDS.

Could be possible with another STD with immunodeficiency syndromes though.

Impossible? Why? From my understanding HIV (which causes the AIDS condition) developed from SIV which is found in primates. The assumption is that either through the handling or ingestion of bushmeat that SIV entered humans and turned into HIV.

What about that is something that has to be limited to the 20th century?
 
I'm sure that both HIVs spread into humans multiple times over the millennia. But it takes widespread promiscuity for it to spread.
Mostly, it probably killed off individual villages, and burned out.

The kind of stresses that slaves underwent depress the immune system and make them more susceptible to all diseases. Given the huge death toll from capture inland, storage near the coast, the nasty transatlantic voyage, etc., It's unlikely to have a great effect.

Basically, if it gets established on the Smith family plantation, their slaves get a reputation for being sickly, and the plantation fails. Especially when the male heirs die young....
 

Anawrahta

Banned
[QUOTE=" ....Especially when the male heirs die young....[/QUOTE]
I see... what you did.... there...... :confounded:
 
AIDS is a disease with a relatively long latency period before symptoms, and eventual death. The role of bacteria in disease was unknown until the late 1869s-1870s, and viruses not until the 1920s and later. The person infected with HIV can pass it on well before any symptoms are noted, and with immune depression a key symptom, and the prevalence of infectious disease before the early 20th century, the majority of HIV patients would die from "normal" diseases and nothing new would be noted. What all this means is that you WILL get significant HIV spread, sex between whites and slaves was common enough, so you'd get transfer in to the broader white community. If and when this becomes recognized as some sort of disease it will be associated with sexual activity and culturally you'll have a severe shift towards sexual abstinence etc.

This may also make slave owning less acceptable, and if it is associated with Africans, make racism worse.
 
Also, we forget one major means of transmission in the period: bloodletting. Cutting into the veins of multiple people with the same non sterile knives is a recipe for rapid transmission.
 
@H.Flashman(VC): You are correct, due to the latency and the fact that the genitals are not obviously involved (unlike syphilis and gonorrhea among others), actually realizing that it is an STD is problematic (why I put in "if and when"). Medical statistics were something that came about slowly beginning in the early 19th century. OTL it was the presence of AIDS in a distinct group (gay men) that started the investigation and it went from there. In the 18th & 19th centuries while there were gay men, and subsets that were promiscuous, identifying them would not be easy as the "closet" was where they lived.

@Arcavius : The fact that bloodletting instruments were not sterilized is unlikely to lead to any significant HIV spread. They were usually cleaned of obvious blood, and unlike shared needles among drug users, were not used from one person to another with fresh blood on them as a routine. The HIV virus will only persist so long, especially in dried blood on an instrument. While HIV has been transmitted to a person through a cut in the skin this was with fresh blood, the usual means of infection is through IV injection or deeper viral injection with contaminated needles or instruments. Having said that, yes there will likely be some transmission via contaminated medical instruments but it won't be a major issue.

One real serious problem is that OTL things like handwashing, antisepsis, and so forth, were demonstrably effective in dealing with disease spread. Given the immune depression of HIV, these measures may not be seen as effective as the widespread presence of HIV will mean that using these methods (and similar) won't matter very much. OTL the effectiveness of these very basic methods was demonstrated conclusively in relatively small studies, but to prove it here you'd need to segregate HIV immune depressed patients from ones with healthy immune systems which won't be possible.

This scenario WILL result in a worldwide spread of HIV with only isolated populations being disease free. The spread will be slower with sailing ships but it will happen. Over decades you'll see a massive population collapse, and lower birth rates and child survival (HIV transmission to the fetus) and collapse of "modern" civilizations is possible. Trial and error may mean eventually chastity and single partners are the only way to have a chance at being safe. There are folks who are naturally immune/able to defeat HIV (very few cases) and natural selection will come in to play perhaps.
 
Due to the lower employment opportunities for women in the 18th and 19th century prostitution was far more common than it is today. That would cause an HIV pandemic in urban areas, throw some sailors into the mix and it becomes a worldwide problem.
 
Top