It just never quits, does it? Not one day after we post a well-reasoned, factual response to the incorrect medical advice being proffered by a porn director, we not only get a ration of shit on that guy's website but we get the interesting news that one porn performer who tested positive for chlamydia, who failed to pick up her medication for it the first time it was offered — she got it on the second try — apparently decided she didn't want to chance testing positive for the disease again, so she tried to forge her test to make it appeared that she wasn't a carrier.
Or as AIM executive director Sharon Mitchell put it: "WELCOME TO YOUR WORLD WITHOUT AIM one more time."
All of which AVN Senior Editor Mark Kernes to respond, somewhat personally, to what currently appears on Mike South's Website and in a recent e-mail:
Mike South writes, of AVN's recent article:
<<…or is this not the interview?>>
This is not the interview...
As you should well know, because you and Tim Connelly have, from what I understand, talked on the phone, and Tim made it quite clear that Sharon would answer a series of questions from you for publication in the August AVN, and that was, to my understanding, settled between the two of you.
But what has your response been?
<<Late last week I was asked by performer Aphrodite to explain the difference between the ELISA and the RT PCR test. I have been expressing my opinions on all of this in an authoritative manner and I felt a moral obligation to answer her questions to the best of my ability.
AVN felt this a breach of the exclusivity of the interview that I had promised them, I apologize if they felt this way, that was clearly not my intention, indeed I considered the fact that answering Aphroditie would "tip my hand" and in reality it did, they responded with a front page article on www.avn.com>>
Well, let's talk about that for a moment. For the past week, I've noticed that you've been "tipping your hand" just about every day, including printing the Mary Carey letter and various other little snipes here and there — but frankly, that doesn't bother me personally, though I could understand if Tim were upset, since you two had apparently agreed to stay mum on the subject.
No, what pisses me off (to coin a phrase) is the part about, "I have been expressing my opinions on all of this in an authoritative manner and I felt a moral obligation to answer her questions to the best of my ability."
"Authoritative manner"??? WHAT "AUTHORITY"??? "The best of my ability"???? WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR "ABILITY"??? What's your degree in? Deep Sea Fishing? Advanced Porn Videography?
I asked Sharon the 20 questions you proposed, and for your edification, I'm going to quote from her answer to the second one, "What are your qualifications?"
Sharon Mitchell: "I have certifications in HIV and chemical dependency, from the state of California and Mission Community College. I am a Specialist in Chemical Dependency — a C.D.S. I have certifications from the Office of AIDS Policy and Procedure, a federal agency for HIV counseling and testing. I am a licensed phlebotomy technician and I'm certified from CNS, continuing education there. I'm a certified STD counselor. I teach continuing medical education seminars to the public health doctors so they can better serve and work with sex workers through Children's Hospital and various public health agencies. I am a Clinical Sexologist from the American College of Sexologists, a nationally recognized boarded institution; I passed my Boards. I have a Master's degree in Public Health from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. I'll have my doctorate in Human Sexuality in four months, and then following that, I'm a doctoral candidate for my Ph.D. in Human Sexuality at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, of which my doctoral thesis will be on the need for monitoring for HIV and STDs in adult entertainment industry, because I'm the leading authority on PCR-DNA testing and have been the single entity who's done the most testing on this subject for this demographic of people."
Hmmm... let's see: On the one hand, I've got a woman with a Master's degree in Public Health, who's four months away from her doctorate in Human Sexuality; she's been certified by the state of California in HIV, certified by the federal Office of AIDS Policy and Procedure for HIV counseling and testing, has passed the national Board exams to be a Clinical Sexologist, and is planning to write her doctoral thesis on a subject —- PCR-DNA testing — about which she has more hands-on experience than any other person in the world! And on the other hand, I've got some hick from Georgia whose main qualification to talk about HIV testing is that he can catch a mess o' big-mouthed bass and shoots porn videos for a living.
In other words, WHO THE FUCK IN HIS/HER RIGHT MIND WOULD LISTEN TO YOU ON THE SUBJECT OF WHAT THE PROPER HIV TEST IS?
I mean, if you've got any degrees in virology, immunology, public health, human immuno-viruses, infectious diseases or ANYTHING remotely related to those fields, by all means, trot them out! I haven't seen you profess to any yet, and that leads me to suspect that if you had them, you'd have mentioned them at some point already.
You wrote:
<<You will note after reading it that the article is more of a response to my response to Aphrodite than it is to my questions.>>
Well, DUH! If you'd bothered to read the article on AVN.com, you'd have seen that that's EXACTLY what it is. One would have thought you'd have gotten a clue about that since your response to Aphrodite is quoted almost in its entirety, and I personally — not Tim Connelly, not anyone else — asked Sharon to comment on it because I knew it to be horseshit, she knew it to be horseshit, and anybody who's been paying attention to the problems the adult industry has been having with HIV since 1997-'98 would have known it was horseshit.
The reason I took it upon myself to ask Sharon to respond to your posting, regardless of any agreement you might have made with Connelly, is because I wanted to head off the possibility of any porn stars actually TAKING your advice, which is a prescription for a long, slow and often painful death from HIV.
Y'see, Mike, AVN is a monthly publication. Articles written for it today, July 2, probably won't see publication in the magazine for about 50 days, in the September issue. Articles completed last week will appear in the August issue, which many folks will see in about three weeks.
But the Internet being the "hot" medium that it is, I realized that your advice could start performers in porn on the road to death as early as the day it was posted, so I felt I had to act quickly to get the FACTS out from someone who, unlike yourself, has enough education to KNOW what she's talking about.
You wrote:
<<This is one of the hallmarks of Mark Kernes. Magicians call it misdirection, politicians call it spin and journalists call it obfuscation. Southerners have a more succinct term for it.>>
So a DIRECT RESPONSE by a KNOWLEDGABLE PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTITIONER to the PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC JARGON of some GEORGIA HILLBILLY WITH A SHOTGUN is "misdirection," "spin," "obfuscation"? (And I won't even dignify the statement that this is one of my "hallmarks" with a response. The folks who've been reading my stuff in the magazine for 20 years likely have a different view.)
After quoting from a Roche Pharmaceuticals letter, you conclude:
<<Now what this means is that RT-PCR-DNA and RT-PCR-RNA are the same thing. >>
BY WHAT EXPERTISE DO YOU DRAW THAT CONCLUSION? You asshole — you're apparently not even smart enough to know when you don't know something! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! Do you even go to a doctor for your own healthcare? Or do you look up some witch back in the hills?
You quoted and responded:
<<South: The problem with these tests is that they are only accurate to about forty parts per million, below that point the virus is undetectable. Someone who has HIV and has been on protease inhibitor drugs can fall well below this level and the tests determine them to be HIV Negative which they clearly are not. They are also most certainly still capable of passing on the virus to someone else.
Mitchell: That's all correct, bearing in mind that "forty parts per million" is equivalent of 400 copies per milliliter [see below], but it refers to the PCR-RNA test.
At this point Sharon says that everything that I am maintaining is "all correct" so WHERE exactly is the argument? I am maintaining that the current testing proceedures are inadequate because of this. >>
First of all, that last sentence is a lie. You were maintaining that the ELISA (antibody) test was superior (at least cost-wise) to the PCR-DNA test which AIM administers, and that, cost aside, there wasn't enough of a difference between them to prefer one over the other.
And speaking of "misdirection," that's fully present in that last sentence as well. As anyone who knows anything about HIV can tell you, it's only a matter of days from the time a person is infected until they're at their most infectious, because the virus initially replicates itself in the body very quickly. After a month or so, the amount of virus in the blood decreases dramatically, then begins building later in the course of the disease until the person's eventual death.
So what that means is that there is NO testing procedure that can guarantee that a sexually active person is free of HIV infection at any particular time. If someone is tested today (by a DNA test), they could contract HIV tomorrow and be spreading it for something just short of 28 days — the AIM test limit — until they were discovered and tracked (by AIM, the only organization IN THE WORLD that's doing that work), and their partners in porn (and elsewhere) contacted (by AIM, the only organization IN THE WORLD that's doing that work) and then started on a treatment regimen.
But fortunately, there are a few factors in the industry's favor. First of all, HIV isn't that easy to spread. You can't get it from a toilet seat — unless there's fresh infected blood on the toilet seat and you have a cut on your ass. Even blood to blood contact, the usual transmission method, doesn't necessarily result in transmission. Second, THANKS TO THE PREVENTION EDUCATION THAT TALENT GETS FROM AIM, most of them are smart enough these days to take some precautions in their personal and non-porn business lives to lessen the possibility that they will contract the disease from persons outside the industry. And third, they have to get tested every month — though I understand some companies have their contract players and others tested every two weeks — and no reputable company will allow a performer to work without a recent test, and most talent won't work with someone who doesn't have a recent test.
So it's just a little disingenuous on your part to say that the "current testing procedures are inadequate" — ALL TESTING PROCEDURES ARE INADEQUATE FOR PORN PERFORMERS! What we DO know is that the AIM procedures have WORKED SO FAR — since AIM's inception, there has not been one single case of HIV transmission on a porn set — and that AIM's procedures have been approved by all the necessary state and federal health agencies. (How do we know this? Because Sharon Mitchell talks to and meets with these health officials on a regular basis.)
You wrote:
<<I was good enough to give you people my source (The AIDS Foundation) that states that the ELISA test is entirely effective for this population, where does Sharon Mitchell get her information?>>
First of all, I doubt that the AIDS Foundation states that the ELISA test is "entirely effective" for the PORN STAR population; they don't even WORK with that population! Sharon Mitchell does — and she also works with the local branch of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and THEY FULLY APPROVE of her testing protocol.
Later, you wrote:
<<This is clear misdirection, again I give my source for my information what is hers? The numbers she is quoting are entirely arbitrary>>
HOW THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW THAT? Reality check: YOU AREN'T AN HIV RESEARCHER! YOU DON'T HAVE A DEGREE IN ANY HEALTH-RELATED FIELD!!!!!!!!!
You wrote, quoting an unnamed "professional who designs nucleic acid-based diagnostic tests":
<<Mike, her argument is BULLSHIT, dangerous and something I regard as criminally negligent. This is GARBAGE to the extreme.
He goes on to explain why in a manner that I don’t fully comprehend and finishes with this.
She cannot use this study to justify her arguments - its bloody criminal and in no way representative of a porn performer or the situation that the argument is about. There is no context provided for the documents she produced so they cannot be provided as proof of anything.>>
Well, that's great: Some know-nothing (about public health, anyway) from bullfrog country, who's done NO research with HIV and has NO training in the subject, quotes some unnamed "professional" whose qualifications he doesn't list, and expects the porn community to take his word over that of a woman with a Master's in Public Health, who's well on her way to a doctorate, who WROTE THE TESTING PROTOCOL that's been approved by all the applicable state and federal health agencies, and who WORKS WITH PORN STARS EVERY DAY!
And the sad truth is, some of the poor fools will. And if anybody dies from your non-expert "advice," Mr. South, the blood will be on your hands.
As for me, I don't have the words to express the depth of my disgust for someone who, through a lack of understanding, education and expertise, puts the lives of people he supposedly cares about at risk.
And in case you can't figure out who that is, it's you, Mike.
To read Mike South's full article, click here
