Porn Valley- There’s bad news and there’s possible bad news. The bad news is that the first generation of female performers who have worked with Darren James will have to wait 60 days now, not 30 before they’re extended a clean bill of health. More bad news is that the industry may just have to come to a grinding halt for 60 days to allow for containment of a posible HIV threat.

In a conversation with AIM’s Sharon Mitchell this morning, Mitchell said she made the decision to extend the waiting period for first generation performers to 60 days.

“I went back on all my records last night and I made the decision,” she said. “PCR-DNA will pick up 75% of HIV after 30 days. But after 60 days it picks up 99%. So I don’t feel comfortable letting people work in the community even if there’s 25% risk. Unlikely but very possible. And with a male [Darren James] working with so many women, you have to go by the book on this. I know we all want to make money but we’ve got to hold tight on these women. These first 12 women- we really have to watch them carefully.”

Gene: Is there a suspicion that any more first generations might surface?

Mitchell: I haven’t found any more first generations. I did get a list of some people that were found by a production company that was scanning footage yesterday. But I believe this happened before Darren worked on the set. I believe it was the same shoot, however. But I will further investigate. It involved Jay Ashley. I went over everything with Jay yesterday with a fine tooth comb. But I’m going to double check and see if it is.

Gene: But that would only put Jay as possible second generation.

Mitchell: Yeah. This is all second generation-stuff. I have no more first generation information at all. But if any of these girls in the first generation comes up detected for HIV, then the second generation becomes the first and everything moves up a generation. That it continues the serious threat of an epidemic of HIV in the adult entertainment industry, is a reality.

Gene: If one girl is detected HIV then it’s a mess.

Mitchell: The government is just ready to regulate this. This is not good news for us. They’re grateful for AIM, but as a pure form of censorship it would be easy to come in and declare this a health hazard. We want to make sure this is all contained and that we’re working together and let them know that we have it under control. They’re chomping at the bit to say this is the unhealthiest hell hole of a job. The government has a task force and I work as a liason between the task force and the industry. They agreed to start working on the gay side of the industry because the gay side doesn’t even have a testing program I’ve been working with the gay side to set up a testing program. But the rate of positivity of actors that are already work on the gay side is really high.

We don’t know how high. It could be 60-80%. It could be 90% They treat everybody like a risk but they’re starting to do bare backing and they’re not testing. The government doesn’t distinguish between the gay and straight industry but we do. We know it’s two separate businesses. But they don’t. They want to slap one protocol on the whole thing, put condoms on everyone, crappy testing, make the windows for testing far apart so people would have to wait longer to shoot and slow down the shooting and kick shooting out of L.A. That’s what they really want to do.

And this outbreak is not helping our side of it. It couldn’t have come at a worst time.