By 1983, HIV was still not a household word, but it was at the very least fairly well known in the medical research field. As the virus spread rapidly amongst the American gay community, eventually evolving into a worldwide epidemic, doctors in France were beginning to notice a similar disease sprouting up amongst migrant workers from Africa. It wasn’t the first time the virus had appeared in Europe, having been brought back by Europeans working in Africa, but these cases were fairly limited and it had never before appeared in noticeable clusters. After confirming that the virus was the same as the one in the United States, which involved a whole lot of pointless scientific bickering between the U.S. and French labs, questions began to be asked of what in the hell might be going on down in Africa.
While HIV slowly made its way across the Atlantic to Haiti and then the United States over a period of a decade, it spread much faster across first central, and then all of Sub-Saharan Africa. Zaire was the first country to have an outbreak of considerable size, though its existence was largely hidden by a lack knowledge about it, though identifiable by a surge in opportunistic infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, and tuberculosis. However, given that these diseases were already endemic on the continent, and that the political situation in the region was rarely stable, such warning signs were mostly ignored. As a result, when researchers finally turned their attention to what was going on in Africa by the mid-1980’s, the virus was already widespread in nearly every country on the continent.
The rapid spread of HIV across the African continent was due to several key factors, one major one being economic growth. Throughout the 1970’s, one of the primary vectors for spreading the disease was via the significant network of truck drivers moving across the continent and the prostitutes which saw to their personal needs. These truck drivers then brought the disease home to their families where it was spread further. As Africa began to shake off its post-colonial economic malaise, this vector only increased, with countless men migrating to cities to find work to support their families left home in the rural villages, which in turn unsurprisingly led to an even higher demand for prostitutes.
When western aid workers first began fighting the spread of HIV in Africa in the late 1980’s, these were the main areas of focus, resulting in massive efforts to get hookers and truck drivers to use condoms. Unfortunately, these efforts did exactly jack shit due to the aid workers refusing to acknowledge local cultural norms regarding the acceptability of polyamorous relationships for both African men and women. Thanks to long-term sexual contact being more likely to spread the virus and nearly everyone having multiple regular sexual partners, HIV just went gang busters. A situation that was little helped by many African governments flat out refusing to even acknowledge the spread of the virus in their countries, referring to it as that gay disease from America.
It wasn’t until the late-1990’s that aid workers and African governments finally pulled their heads out of their asses enough to start actually taking on the problem. By then, millions had already caught the disease and died, including hundreds of thousands of cases of mothers giving it to their unborn babies. In many countries, 10 percent or more of the population became infected, HIV became the number one cause of death, and life expectancy began to fall drastically. By 2011, some 35 million Africans were infected, and over 15 million had died. Though aid workers and African governments had shifted to strategies centered on educating the wider public, gains were limited by social stigmas surrounding the virus, a refusal by many to change cultural norms, and a lack of funding.
In 1996, researchers developed a cocktail of retrovirus drugs which proved effective at treating HIV, which resulted in an almost immediate sharp drop in deaths and new infections across the developed world. However, the drugs’ use in Africa was severely limited due to the region’s widespread poverty, the expense of the drugs, and the scope of the outbreak. As a result, HIV continued to spread, until finally a U.S. president said enough was enough. That president was George W. Bush. In 2003, Georgie-Boy pushed through an $80 billion relief package through Congress, the largest aid package in history targeting a single disease, which made the retrovirus cocktail widely available throughout Africa. Today it is estimated that this package directly saved the lives of some 7 million people and prevented god only knows how many new infections. Today, HIV continues to kill 770,000 people worldwide each year, but this is down drastically from the 2 million per year just fifteen years before.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aids_is_commons_in_Africa.jpeg