[norton]

Thanks, but I don't understand that as being the only defining condition (just defending my guesswork).

In a quick search I hit 21 'AIDS indicators' in addition to Kaposi's Sarcoma - which itself is not limited only to AIDS/HIV sufferers but appears to have been limited to certain ethnicities not associated with the Caribbean prior to the time frame you indicated.

Seems to me that the immune deficiency probably existed before the "new" cancer arrived to become its hallmark?

[Jim Noble]

AIDS and related conditions are very distinctive to the trained eye.

David Livingstone, and successor generations of British colonial doctors, were superb observers. Their 130-year old drawings of various tropical maladies are still used for instruction and diagnosis - that's how good they were, and are.

If AIDS existed in Africa in the colonial period, it would have been well-known.