Industry Scores Great Report, Lousy Editorial Note From CDC

SACRAMENTO - The 14 doctors and other healthcare professionals who signed onto the study that will appear in Friday's issue of the Center for Disease Control's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR) seem to give reasonably high marks to AIM Healthcare Foundation's handling of last year's HIV outbreak. The unsigned "Editorial Note" that follows, on the other hand, seems to be doing its best to undo the study's good words.

" The report is typical MMWR stuff, which is always good," noted Dr. Sharon Mitchell, Ph.D., AIM's founder. "They're usually 400 words or less, and they're an accurate depiction with study statistics and attack rates only. There's only so much you can put in there."

Indeed, the report tracks the outbreak from its origins, giving dates of positive and negative HIV tests, the number of primary and secondary contacts with possible HIV carriers, and the steps that were taken to isolate carriers and to test the contacted talent pool. It also notes that the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) issued two citations (to Evasive Angles and TTB Productions) as a result of an investigation into the situation for "failing to comply with the state’s bloodborne pathogen standard (2), failing to report a serious work-related illness, and failing to prepare and follow a written occupational injury and illness prevention program."

There is still a question as to whether Evasive Angles and TTB were "employers" of the HIV-positive performers under the law, and therefore subject to Cal/OSHA's regulations regarding compliance with the bloodborne pathogen standard (2), filing an illness report and following a prevention program. Those matters will likely be settled in court, and if that ruling finds that the talent were independent contractors, the citations likely would be dismissed.

That question, however, did not seem to trouble the anonymous author of the Editorial Note appended to the CDC report, which takes issue with the adult industry's HIV and STD prevention methodology – and that makes Mitchell angry.

"First of all, it's never been determined, and I think OSHA has admitted this, whether performers are employees or independent contractors; in other words, who is supposed to take responsibility for what," Mitchell listed. "Two, that [performer status] is typically determined by a good-faith meeting between OSHA and the population at risk to discuss issues. Then whoever would take the responsibility for the workplace, whether it be producers or whoever, they would have to determine, thirdly, whether it is workable in the workplace. In other words, is a moon-suit going to work in an adult film? That type of thing. Number four, they need to decide the means to enforce: How, where, who, and where does the money come from? And number five, and I think this is where AIM has a right to state some statistics, from our point of view, this may be a disproportionate response, because last year, there were about 2000 new infections of HIV in Los Angeles County. Four of them were from our industry, so this might be a disproportionate response. To spend all this money and – ultimately, is it going to make things safer? Probably. But is this community going to be able to handle these types of measures, and how can we determine that?"

Mitchell specifically takes issue with the editorial note's mention of industry STD statistics from June 2000–December 2001, which the note admits were "before voluntary monthly STD screening was instituted." The note claims that "prevalences of chlamydial infection and gonorrhea among heterosexual adult film industry workers in California were 5.5 percent for males and 7.7 percent for females for chlamydial infection and 2.0 percent for both males and females for gonorrhea," while "a nationally representative sample of young adults aged 18–26 years during April 2001–May 2002 revealed prevalence of chlamydial infection among males and females to be 3.7 percent and 4.7 percent respectively, and, similarly, prevalence of gonorrhea to be 0.4 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively."

"There was one month in 2001 or 2002 when I called everyone in for a routine screening because we had a spike in our STD rates, and I think they included the spike in their data," Mitchell responds. "Our chlamydia rate is 1.8 to 2.8 percent now since we instituted our monthly screenings, so we're lower than the general population. We have records of all our rates, but nobody even asked us for them."