I don’t see how AIDS could ‘wipe out all of humanity’, it’s a relatively hard to transmit disease that takes a long time to actually kill a person. Syphilis is deadlier and easier to transmit, and while highly widespread at several points in history never came close to an extinction level event. “Survivors huddled in isolated groups” doesn’t really make sense for a disease that takes years to decades to become fatal and for which appears to not even hurt a number of people who contract it.
Didn’t mean to suggest that AIDS in the 19th century would wipe humanity out completely - but AIDS in a society with the barest notion of germ theory and sanitation, and also with a world-spanning empire promoting travel among all the inhabited continents would lead to a crisis far worse than the one that developed in the 1980s and after.
Thank you all.
This.
Randy Shilts addressed this in detail, in his must-read 1987 book And the Band Played On. Standard epidemiology principles made closing the bathhouses an obvious step, and there were more than a few in San Francisco who advocated this. But countering them was a group who viewed the bathhouses as a vital aspect of hard-won sexual liberation. The second group said to the first “Back off, or we will destroy you politically” - and thus prevailed.
The result, by Shilts’ analysis, was something like 100,000 additional deaths. Among them was a good friend of mine. And, eventually, Shilts himself.
Testing donated blood for syphilis happened as early as 1947.Not sure how much harder testing for HIV would have been.
What they probably would have done is to closely screen donors and then not mix blood from different donors. This would likely have cut the risk of blood transfusions dramatically.
And yet, even when it was known that Hepatitis C virus was in the blood supply, it took years for the US to begin screening. In the 1990s.
Relevant wiki article that lists possible cases as early as 1945(!).
When testing was first done for HIV, it took several months from initial infection to the point a test would register positive. I believe it’s down to a few days(maybe less) now.
How widespread was the use of injected drugs? In Spain (and I expect we weren’t the only ones) at the beginning the biggest transmission vector was shared needles, we had lots of addicts and former addicts dying of AIDS, people who’d managed to “kick the horse back” only to die of the plague before they got to see their children grown; one of the biggest measures taken was therefore making needles available no questions asked. But in 1850, heroin hadn’t even been discovered yet.
Interesting article about “Patient Zero”, a flight attendant blamed in Shilts’ book for being at the epicenter of the epidemic in the late 70s and spreading HIV in bathhouses and among his many sexual partners.
"A new genomic study has shown that HIV traveled to New York City from the Caribbean in 1971, clearing the name of the man mistakenly dubbed “Patient Zero.”
There might well be a wider social effect too, the discrimination was bad enough when it did occur but at least there was a climate that allowed effective campaigning against it.
Imagine in the '50’s the quarantine measures would likely have been more stringent and probably amount to detainment without trial - once the disease was perceived to have been spread into mainstream population in the US this would have reinforced the stereotype based discrimination not only in relation to Gay community but would likely have bled in to stronger discrimination against anyone who already suffered from it at the time,
I think discrimination would have effectively become a social policy and completely justified in the minds of many, which makes me wonder how the civil rights movement would have coped in the 1960’s.
I’m skeptical that this amounts to clearing his name. He wasn’t the first one with AIDS, but he certainly was an important early vector for its spread.
Oh, it certainly doesn’t clear him of being a vector. However he was demonized, particularly as the “first” vector
Good point. Cocaine was being used by needle in the 1870s, but needle use would probably be less of a vector for AIDs in the 19th century. Whether other practices that allow blood-to-blood transfer (unsanitary doctors, barbers, etc.) would make up for that lack is a question I don’t know the answer to.
Like I said before, I’m not sure that an AIDS breakout in the 50s (and especially 60s) would be tied to the gay community. The widespread lessened hostility towards homosexuality and ‘free love’ movement hadn’t happened yet, so gays were a lot more underground. This meant both that communities were smaller and members were less likely to tell a doctor that they engaged in any sort of homosexual activity. I think there’s a good chance that the disease would be associated with needle drugs, or (if it happened in the 60s) with troops in Vietnam, and so might not have ever gotten a GRIDS designation in the first place.
Cocaine may have been injected as early as the 1870’s, but the major cause of the spread of HIV in the last 30 years among drug users is sharing and re-use of needles by whole communities. I guess the question is how much mix-and-match there would have been back in the 1800’s? My impression is that injection syringes would have been pretty specialized equipment for solitary rich people not something that a bunch of skid row junkies would share. (No hint, for example, in Sherlock Holmes stories that he was a social user).
I think that syphilis would be a pretty good alternative model for AIDS spread. The bath houses created a perfect storm. Otherwise, the pockets would have been too small and the spread too slow. there’s nothing special about gay sex for spreading AIDS other than a slightly higher risk; it was the level of promiscuity, the number of concurrent partners in a short time that caused the outbreak. I don’t recall too many straight sexual environments with that level of social “infectious behaviour”, although one presumes swinger clubs come close.
Take a lesson from Africa - during the worst of the epidemic there was a whole generation of parents dying, and stories that 10% to 25% of some societies were infected; one item I read claimed 50% of adults in Uganda - and being third world, not a lot of resources to test the disease and limited education about the realities of cause and prevention. Yet that seems to be turning around now. Yet the thought was that it took decades, possible a century or more, for it to become epidemic, and one major contributor was the social breakdown of urbanization - providing the opportunities for promiscuity (particularly through prostitution) that were lacking in traditional society.
I would think the problem nowadays, too, is the casual amount of international travel. Patient Zero may be simply one of dozens (hundreds? Thousands?) of patients who travelled widely and participated in infectious behaviour wherever they landed. Presumably the nature of the gay liberation also meant that people from all over travelled there to SF or NYC when they could to take advantage of the scene, whether out at home or not. (When one of my relatives had her husband leave her for a younger man after 30 years, the first thing she did was get tested; the guy had worked in Manhattan for years, plus travelled a lot. Fortunately, she was clean.)
Since it’s insidious and slow-acting, one presumes in the “old days” it would have been a mystery plague. But even then, it would be more obvious that the more hedonistic were more likely to die from it, and the association with sex would be made within a few decades. After all, there are a decent(?) number of people who do stay monogamous, and noting that (rumored) partners tended to both die might be a give-away. (I recall reading that associating cervical cancer with sex was noted in the 1800’s when a doctor pointed out that celibate nuns never seemed to get the condition. Of course, the role of HPV was not known at the time.).
Edit to add: also, presumably anything where AIDS is being spread through promiscuity, before the days of penicillin, its likely that other STD’s would put a damper on such activity before AIDS did.
Syphilis is caused by a bacterium. HIV-1 and HIV-2 are caused by viruses, and the ELISAmethod used to identify them wasn’t even developed until 1972.
TYVM. Dr. Grethe Rask is mentioned in “And The Band Played On,” and was an out lesbian all her adult life.
Dr. Peter Piot, who was one of the co-discoverers of Ebola in 1976, had some of those specimens, drawn on the Zaire-Sudan border where that first identified epidemic broke out, tested for HIV a decade or so later, and found that about 1% had evidence of HIV.
As for how the disease got to Haiti, in the 1960s and 1970s a large number of Haitians went to Congo/Zaire, most likely to work on the Kinshasa Highway, and that’s where they most likely picked it up.
And as for bathhouses, where many of the patrons accumulated sex partners numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, doctors in the communities where they were popular feared the possibility of something showing up that they couldn’t treat, let alone cure, and sure enough, that happened.
No longer paying whole-blood donors also dramatically decreased the risk of transfusion-associated hepatitis.
Even in the early days of AIDS, if I heard some fundie say that AIDS was probably a plague sent from God to punish gay men for their sins, I have always replied, “So, why don’t lesbians get it? They’re just as gay themselves.” The response is usually along the lines of, “Um, um, um…”