Stepped-up Hep C testing for AIM. \nLOS ANGELES - A one-time craft worker in the adult film business is crafting another kind of battle - fighting Hepatitis C, which she says she contracted from someone still active in the porn business. Meanwhile, an adult film legend - who once came down with the illness but came out of it - says it's uncertain but not ruled out whether Hep C is a sexually transmitted disease.
Stephanie Mason is scheduled to tape a segment for Leeza Gibbons's popular talk television show Friday about her battle. "Hepatitis C is deadly and something you should be taking medicine for," she tells AVN's Gene Ross. "The person I got it from is in this business and I found some horrible facts out that scare me."
Mason claims that individual, whom she did not name, is now a sexual partner of someone else in the adult film circuit. "She's doing porno movies. This really terrifies me. I don't know if you know about Hepatitis C, but I think there's a lot the adult business doesn't know about it."
One who does know about it is one of the adult film world's legends - Sharon Mitchell, now director of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, and herself a one-time sufferer of Hepatitis C.
"Hepatitis C is real famous for being like if you share straws [snorting cocaine], and, obviously, if you're sharing needles, sharing razor blazes," she says. "Remember, when you're living with someone, you're doing other things besides having sex with them. They're not sure it's a sexually transmitted disease, not that they're not ruling it out, either. So there's not enough really known about it. I know that there's been a lot of people diagnosed within the industry, but, remember 15 to 35% of the people grow out of it. Just like Hepatitis B or A. A lot of people make their own antibodies and fight it themselves."
Mitchell says she herself came down with Hep C in 1992 but grew out of it and is now one of those in whom the disease is not detectable. And she says that in the adult film business, it's very hard to detect a source for the virus. "When there's multiple sex partners, yes," she says. "A large portion of us got it years ago. A lot of people got it when we were all getting loaded, sharing straws and getting high. A lot of people don't even know that they have it until they get a biopsy or a liver scan."
Hep C symptoms include chronic fatigue, joint pains, night sweats, liver inflammations, and others. "I grew out of it, luckily," Mitchell says, "but because it's not easily sexually spread, it's hard to say who gave it to you. I don't know how anyone can prove that."
Mason also claims the partner in question told her to claim it sprang from a 1995 accident. She had been, Ross says, riding an all-glass observation train traveling from Munich to Innsbrueck, when the train collided with another oncoming passenger train, causing Mason's eye to dislodge from its socket, forcing her to spend a year recuperating.
But she says the accident had nothing to do with her illness. "For a year he made me say that it was from (the) accident in 1995," she says. "He told me that nobody would want me. I believed that. I was insecure."
Mitchell says AIM now does a good deal of Hep C testing, with some people leaving the adult entertainment business because they have the illness while others have gone to condom-only status because of it.
"The statistics that are coming out more recently, do not necessarily put this in a sexually transmitted disease category," she says. "But remember all these things change when we're dealing with porn. In porn we have extreme sex and we have multiple sex partners over and over again."
She says the liver is one of the few self-rejuvenating internal organs, and that's helped by "good combination therapies" including Rebetron and Interferon. "But these are typically the combination therapies where the side effects are really brutal," she advises. The side effects can include vomiting, stomach cramps, pains in the back of the legs, and others.
The incubation period for Hep C is 2-25 weeks, with the average said to be 7-9 weeks. Mitchell says it can be spread by contact with infected blood, needles, razors, tattoo or body-piercing tools, even from an infected mother to a newborn.
"All my information says that it's not spread easily through sex," she says. "People at risk are people with blood transfusions, particularly before 992, because that's when we know they started screening the blood; IV drug users, hemodialysis patients, infants born to infected mothers and multiple sex partners."
Mason, meanwhile, continues coming to terms with her condition, saying her medication program is comparable to cancer chemotherapy. "I've lost my hair," she tells Ross. "I've lost like 45 pounds. I can't go anywhere, I can't do anything. I don't want to be seen by anyone. For the first four months, I just sat in bed and cried."
But a girl friend took her on a trip to Alaska, and that changed her mood, she says. "Since then, I've been out of the house as much as I can, even though I feel terrible. But that's life…I'm in remission. But the person I got it from still hasn't gone to the doctor, and his doctor is the same one as mine."
Mason says that problem, though, is secondary to the problem "that he's now living with a porn star. He's sleeping with her, and this is a problem to other people in the business. For a fact, he's got hepatitis. For a fact, she's sleeping with him. What he says is this, 'Why wear a condom? By the time somebody else gets it, they're going to have a cure.' He's having sex with talent and talent is having sex with him."
