Not using condom considered workplace hazard

"It's illegal for bodily fluids to touch skin ... in the porn industry."

"AIDS Healthcare Foundation .... sued Los Angeles County last month alleging that public health officials had failed to .... enforce laws requiring employers to protect workers against exposure to bodily fluids."

"... the blood-borne pathogens standard ... was "designed" for the health care industry. There is NO Cal-OSHA standard specifically tailored to the adult entertainment industry. After five years of failed attempts to strong-arm the state legislature into passing enabling statutes that would allow Cal-OSHA to negotiate such an industry-specific standard with leaders of the industry to be regulated as state law requires, the small group of porn-hating fanatics concentrated in the bureaucracy there and at L.A. County Health have simply decided to apply a standard from another, utterly unrelated, industry to porn by administrative decree."

"AIM Healthcare has been successfully taking care of the industry, and sexually active folks, since 1998. When we started the disease rate in the Industry was by our count (the accurate one), 12%. Within two and one half years, it has been holding at between 1.9 %, and on a bad month 3.4%,

...

 

This last HIV case

(Industry folks do have private lives you know) As a result of our investigating up to fourth generation partners, which equated to fifteen potential exposures who were contacted within 36 hours, and thanks to AIM's early detection testing,

"

"You can go to any porn shop or any hotel and pull up incontrovertible evidence against every one of these companies," said Michael Weinstein, president and chief executive of the foundation. "Is there anything today that prevents them from going in and finding any of these porn sites to be dangerous workplaces?"

 

Foundation officials, joined by the nonprofit Pink Cross Foundation, which helps workers leave the adult industry, plan to file complaints with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health based on a review of dozens of DVDs ... made by California-based companies. Of 58 films reviewed ... only two included scenes with condom use."

"Anyone who still argues that this controversy is not about the content of porn or about free speech rights needs to examine the methodology in this filing and think again. Even County Health?s most ideologically driven clap-chaser, Dr. Peter Kerndt, has fervently argued in his PLoS monograph of last spring that it would be perfectly possible to use technical means to make condoms invisible in porn. Earth to Dr. Kerndt: those of us who do shoot with condoms already do that. We don?t use digital post-production effects as he suggests (knowing this would be ruinously expensive) but rather rely on lighting gels, pink latex and good camera work to make condoms less obvious to the viewer. In short, there is no way to tell with a certitude that would meet any standard of legal proof whether condoms were used or not in a given scene in a given video simply by looking at the resulting commercial DVD."