I spoke to Mike Ross, my contact in Sacramento. Ross says he hasn’t heard about the report alluded to in this article.
“I have not heard any information,” said Ross. “I don’t believe that they’re ready to start enforcing stuff. I think they’d be ready to have a hearing. I believe that they cannot enforce a regulation until they’ve had a hearing and adopted a regulation. I don’t believe they’ve adopted anything because there’s no language. I could be wrong because there’s so much going on but I haven’t been notified of anything and I’ve asked to be notified.”
Nevertheless Tuesday night Channel 4 in L.A. reported LA County Health Officer Dr. Jonathan Fielding stating that the adult industry needs to take more precautions against HIV than its self-regulated screening.
Channel 4: “Fielding says screening alone is not an adequate means of preventing work place disease transmission.”
Porn Valley- I spoke Tuesday night with Don Hollywood who had just been interviewed at his house by Channel 4 in Los Angeles. A news crew contacted Hollywood and was apparently on their way to Sardos to get reactions to the long awaited Cal-OSHA report on the porn industry that had apparently come out hours earlier.
“What they told us is that County Public Health wants Cal-OSHA on all adult sets with condoms, dental dams, latex gloves and eye protection,” Hollywood said. Channel 4 talked to Hollywood at 8:30 this evening. “We did about a 45 minute interview with them,” said Hollywood who was told that there’d be a report on the 11 o’clock news. Hollywood’s basic response was that Cal-OSHA needs to jump in the lake and leave the porn business alone.
“Our response to this report that took about a year to come out was, wait a minute- in the last four years there’s been one outbreak which was traced to one performer and regretfully spread to three more performers,” said Hollywood. “If you take the talent pool and say conservatively over that four year period of time, six to seven thousand people went through the industry as talent and you had 4 HIV positives during that period of time, compare that to 7,000 people in Los Angeles County who are as sexually active as the talent in the industry.
“If Brooke and I shoot a scene together- if we have sex 6, 8, 10 times a week- and one of those times there’s a camera rolling, is Cal-OSHA going to tell us that we need to suit up?” Hollywood told Channel 4 that Cal-OSHA can successfully do whatever the rest of California government hasn’t done. “It can drive yet another industry out of California,” he says. “I’m sure there are other states that will welcome the tax dollars with open arms.”
How Cal-OSHA will even begin individually monitoring the number of porn shoots going on weekly through the Valley wasn’t made clear, but it appears that the process will stem in part from information provided by the permits office.