Deborah Gold, a senior safety engineer with the state Occupational Safety and Health Division, said her agency repeatedly had attempted to crack down on unsafe workplaces in the adult entertainment industry, issuing several citations against employers, including a gay male production company that touted its condom-free filming.
Despite those efforts, she said, numerous investigations have found that condoms were not used and that no training had been conducted to prevent unsafe contact.
Los Angeles County has been receiving reports from the clinic of 60 to 80 new cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea a month among adult performers, Fielding said.
The clinic's testing protocol recommends that adult performers get screened for HIV every 30 days. Fielding called that schedule insufficient to protect against transmission because it takes nine to 11 days after exposure for HIV to appear on test results.
"Let's say you were infected on Monday, tested on Wednesday and perform on Friday. You would show up as negative, but you're not negative," Fielding said.
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ron.lin@latimes.com
kimi.yoshino@latimes.com
