Adult film performers are being put at risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections because their employers often ban them from using condoms, argue researchers in this week’s PLoS Medicine.
Dr Corita Grudzen (University of California, Los Angeles) and Dr Peter Kerndt (Los Angeles County Department of Public Health) say that performers in heterosexual adult films are often required to work without condoms as a condition of employment.
The heterosexual adult film industry attempts to control the spread of sexual transmitted diseases (STDs) by periodically conducting STD tests among performers. But such periodic testing, say the authors, often fails to prevent transmission. In 2004, for example, a male performer who had tested HIV negative only three days earlier infected three of 14 female performers.
The adult film industry itself, say Drs Grudzen and Kerndt, lacks the “will or ability” to regulate itself, and needs state and federal legislation to enforce health and safety standards for adult film performers.
Since condoms are 90-95% effective at preventing HIV transmission, industry should be mandated to require condom use for all films, say the authors, and legislators could look to Nevada for a model for the successful regulation of a legal sex-related industry. Since the institution of mandatory condoms in Nevada’s brothels in 1988, not a single sex worker has contracted HIV.
“Short of legislation mandating performer protection, restricting distribution of adult movies to condom-only films may be the one way to have an impact on the industry,” they say. “If there were organized and truly effective advocacy for performers, then large hotel chains, video retailers, and cable networks could be pressured to purchase adult films under a condom-only ‘seal of approval.'”
Citation: Grudzen CR, Kerndt PR (2007) The adult film industry: Time to regulate” PLoS Med 4(6): e126.