from www.laweekly.com – The AIDS Healthcare Foundation announced Thursday that it’s appealing a lawsuit it brought in an effort to force Los Angeles County health officials to require condoms on porn sets in L.A.

The suit had been dismissed by the Los Angeles Superior Court; now AHF is taking it to the Second District California appeals court, the organization stated. AHF has also lobbied the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal-OSHA) to require condoms at porn shoots statewide. The board recently agreed to consider it.

“We are appealing the dismissal of this lawsuit in order to continue to try to compel the Department of Public Health to fulfill its responsibility to try and control the spread of STDs in LA County–particularly in a commercial venue,” stated AHF president Michael Weinstein.

The organization states that as many as 22 porn actors have contracted HIV in the last five years. It argues that any other industry in the state would be regulated to protect workers.

” … The County has simply not taken the steps necessary to address this serious public health threat,” Weinstein stated. “As an HIV and STD medical provider, it is our obligation to pursue county action on this issue, which goes beyond just the recent HIV outbreak and includes an epidemic of thousands of STD cases in the porn industry — an epidemic virtually ignored by the County Deptartment of Public Health.”