AVN - Contentious Talent Meeting Adds to Confusion About Tes

Contentious Talent Meeting Adds to Confusion About Testing
Posted Jul 20th, 2012 04:43 PM by Mark Kernes

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Between 60 and 75 adult performers, directors, producers and agents met last night at Hustler Studios for a discussion over which HIV/STD testing facilities should be supported by the industry and its trade association, the Free Speech Coalition.

The meeting was called by talent agent and former performer Shy Love, and a sizeable portion of the talent attending were her clients ... so it's not too surprising that, near the end of the discussion when Love stated, "The good thing is, press is here, so if this is what talent wants, the press is willing to write what you say; they can't alter what you say. If you guys say we want the freedom right to choose which lab we go to, have multiple labs so there's not a monopoly so we do not shut down, just go—raise your hand right now and the press will have to put it up, and this will allow Manwin, APHSS and Free Speech to hear that this is what you want and it's not coming from the agent's mouth," whereupon she then proceeded to ask those present to vote on the question, "Does everyone want freedom to choose which labs they want and not to be forced into a monopoly, raise your hand," most hands in the room went up.

It was a perfect example of "push-polling," the object of which is to get the answer the questioner wants ... and it succeeded.

Of course, the questions that should have been discussed were, "Which lab(s) provide the services and staff that adult performers need to make sure they're healthy enough to do their jobs?" and "Which lab(s), as one of their primary duties, put the interests of the adult industry and its performers ahead of those whose objectives are either to shut the industry down or make it so unprofitable that it will go out of business on its own, or leave California entirely?"

These questions were not discussed in any depth during the 90-minute meeting, though there were certainly strong opinions expressed by supporters of Talent Testing Services (TTS), Cutting Edge Testing (CET), the APHSS reporting system and even by people with little or no ax to grind.

The two topics that garnered the most attention were the positions taken by industry mogul Manwin, which recently announced that performers in its movies would be required to show a clean test that was not more than two weeks old, and that it would not accept tests from TTS, only from CET; and the fact that until recently, CET had been using the Abbott RealTime Quantitative HIV-1 test which had not been approved by the FDA as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of the HIV virus, but had recently switched to the Gen-Probe Aptima HIV-1 RNA Qualitative Assay, which has been approved for that purpose.

Love charged that the Abbott test was inferior to the Aptima, although a statement released on May 9 by Free Speech Coalition claimed that "[m]edical experts have assured APHSS.org that the Abbott test is a good option for determining the presence of HIV for adult performers," and it is well-known that the now-defunct AIM testing facility used an "off-label" PCR-DNA test for more than a decade with excellent results. However, a team from Gen-Probe gave a short lecture to those present describing how their Aptima test works and why it is superior to the Abbott RealTime test. (Details of that lecture, which was very similar to one given at a recent industry meeting at Penthouse Studios, can be found here.)

But Love used the Abbott test's alleged inferiority to charge that CET and its owner, Dr. Peter Miao, did not have performers' best interests at heart because CET chooses to use the Abbott test.

"When it comes to the health of my talent," Love later stated, "that prioritizes over anyone because I was there at the forefront waiting to see if I was HIV positive [during the 2004 Darren James incident]; not like everyone else who stands in the background and makes the decisions on your behalf. The reason why we are here is so that the talent can make the decision; not the agent, not the labs, not anybody else: you. So before everybody starts attacking, actually realize, if it wasn't for the agents in this room, you would still be using the Abbott test where you assumed—where specific labs in this building [sic] have said, and we have paperwork saying, 'the Abbott is the best; it's the gold standard; it's the this and everything else,' and we have confirmed, it is not the best for you, but yet, everyone was listening, so we're being—excuse us—thrown like into the wolves. 'Well, you only care about yourself.' If we cared about ourselves, why would we eliminate a test that would put you at risk?"

A fair portion of the meeting was taken up with both attacks and defenses of the Abbott test—all of which, however, occurred without any direct information from Abbott since no one from the company was in attendance.

Another difference between TTS and CET is that CET has a doctor overseeing the clinic's activities, while TTS has its owner/manager, Sixto Pacheco, in charge—a fact that he confirmed when he was asked to speak.

"I have to say, we are not a clinic; we are the testing laboratory, and we are a molecular testing laboratory," Pacheco said.

Performer/director Kimberly Kane asked Pacheco, "How would you handle an outbreak? Like how would you handle if a talent, someone in our industry, got sick and what would you do to provide aftercare for that person?" Immediatey, Love jumped in to respond. "Let me say something real quick: Right now, so everybody knows, that's not even properly set up as of right now, which is what the agents are trying to put together with other departments within this industry. So as of right now, since AIM has been gone, and for the people who have been in the business for over a decade, there hasn't been that set standard yet in this industry."

"Cutting Edge has a doctor who's a specialist," Kane retorted, and then turned to Pacheco to ask, "I just want to know how would you as a company handle a talent getting HIV and would you provide aftercare? Would that person be called or would that person come in, and what would happen when they walked out the door?"

"It depends," Pacheco said. "And I say 'it depends'—why? Because we get samples from all over the country. We also have our site here in L.A., we have our site in Miami; we get samples from Chicago, we get samples from Minnesota, we get samples from Arizona, from Vegas, and everything like that. Now, to answer your direct question, how do we treat a person? We're not a hospital. You know, we don't provide aftercare. We're not a clinic and I want to go back, when we started Talent Testing Service, our idea was not to be an AIM. Our idea was to provide the best test to the talent community. If we—let's take the easy one—if we have a positive case of chlamydia or gonorrhea, we give you options. You know, you can go to A, B, C, D, E, F and G."

"Like a pamphlet?" she pressed.

"Yeah," he replied, "piece of paper that tells you you can go to Dr. Riggs, you can go to Planned Parenthood..."

"I'm not going to Dr. Riggs if I have AIDS!" Kane stated emphatically.

"Let me go back," Pacheco continued. "I said the easy one; let's talk about the hard one, okay? Let's say we jump into a case where we have an HIV. We have protocols and procedures in place which we go—abide by, which are aligned with the state laws that we follow and we contact the patient, we advise them of the result, we tell them that there are resources available for him or her to go to, and on his way."

"So you would tell someone they have HIV on the phone?" Kane pressed.

"It depends," came the reply.

"That's pretty heavy," Kane opined.

Pacheco also stated that his office does not advise any agent of any positive result—a statement that was challenged by one of the CET staffers, who stated that one of the agents had told her that TTS had called Shy Love to tell her that there was a positive on a Brazzers set, and accused Love of having offered her $1.000 for a test result. After a bit of shouting back and forth, during which Love accused the staffer of lying, Love responded that the only reason she'd found out that "a kid" was positive was because one of her ATMLA staff had brought the victim into the business, and when the performer found out his positive HIV status, he called the agent as a friend, looking for advice.

Love went on to claim that when she'd sent four performers to the CET facility in Miami, "there were no doctors, no nothing there; phones were just ringing; no one there. Finally, Brian from Girls, Inc. got them to answer the phone and show up. An hour and a half later, a phlebotomist showed up; there's no doctor; it is a building with one little office room rented, where there's carpet, and someone comes in and draws your blood. So if someone comes out positive over there, who's telling them? The phlebotomist? Because there's no doctor in-house."

Love then returned to her theme that competition among labs was necessary because "if there is a monopoly within labs, and if AIDS Healthcare Foundation comes in and they shut down Cutting Edge, where are we gonna go then? Are you going to go crying to TTS like we always do every time a lab gets shut down: 'Can you please take us back? Can you please take us back?' Because we [talent] do it every time. Or do we go and create two different labs that will provide the services so that if one gets shut down, you're all still making money? And just to let you know, if it wasn't for TTS getting us in conjunction with the people from Gen-Probe, you guys would have never known that you were taking a test that puts your lives at risk on a daily basis."

To follow up on the fact that TTS has no doctor on staff, this reporter asked Pacheco about TTS's policies on informing the L.A. County Department of Public Health (LACDPH) should a performer be found to be HIV- or STD-positive.

By law, such reports need not be made until a performer's possible HIV-positive status has been confirmed with a Western Blot test, and the health department has said that it does not want to receive such reports until that confirmatory test has been performed. However, TTS has a different policy, as was revealed in the following dialog between this reporter and Pacheco:

Kernes: "It's my understanding that if someone you test comes up positive for HIV or chlamydia or gonorrhea, that you have to report that positive finding to the county health department?"

Pacheco: "That's correct."

Kernes: "Does TTS have a policy of how soon after the positive result comes back that you report it to the county authorities?"

Pacheco: "For chlamydia/gonorrhea, we have a system where we report—because the test is performed in Florida, report it to the Miami-Dade County Health Department, and depending on the state and the address and location of the talent, they're responsible to take that positive and inform the local health department where that person lives to make sure they get treated and they get followed up on. Now we also, for positive tests that come out of L.A., out of our office here, we don’t wait for the Miami-Dade County to report it to the L.A. County. We circumvent that and we also report it directly to L.A. County. We do that because we want to make sure everybody is treated on time. For the HIV cases, we do report them; it's by law and we have to do it and we don't fax results; we have to send them by courier and things of that nature."

Kernes: "But how long after the positive results come back do you do that?"

Pacheco: "If it's RNA, we don't have to wait for a confirmatory—I mean, as soon as we hear about it, we go ahead and do it."

Kernes: "So as soon as an HIV positive case comes up, you find a positive HIV case, you immediately report it to the county?"

Pacheco: "Remember, what we consider a positive case is something that goes through an algorithm. Let's say, for example, a person comes into our office; they test initially to be positive for HIV. We take that same sample, we test that in duplicate. Once we find that one or if both of the retest samples are negative, it's a negative. If one of the two is positive, we want to make sure; we call that talent back in; we tell them we need another sample to be drawn. We take that new sample and we retest it. Why? Because these assays that we're testing on, these are molecular tests and they're super-delicate. And when I say super, I can't tell you how delicate these things are. I mean, we have special rooms for pre-am [sp.], which is the procedure that we do before performing the test, and during that process, we go to post-am [sp.], which is a completely different room with exhaust and—it gets complicated. But once we know that person is positive or negative after we follow that algorithm, then we go ahead and report it. So when you say 'immediately,' yes, it's immediately after we have done our algorithm and that algorithm can take one day or two days. Why? Because we may have to call that talent back in."

Kernes: "So after two days, it's reported?"

Pacheco: "Well, it depends, because if we go ahead and say we have a positive and it's a negative, then we don't have a problem, but if we have to call that talent in, when is that talent going to come in? Do they come in, or delay for a time? And I have to wait for them to come in."

Kernes: "But assuming they come in the next day..."

Pacheco: "Yeah, they're pretty good about it."

The problem with that procedure, of course, is that as soon as the LACDPH learns of an HIV infection in the (hetero) porn industry, they will immediate declare a moratorium on production until their staff can interview and test other performers who may have been exposed—and since LACDPH has no particular love for the adult industry, that testing and interviewing could take several weeks, and the moratorium could easily last a month or more.

The better procedure, of course, would be for the doctor at the testing lab where the HIV-positive patient was discovered to find out from that performer who he or she had worked with since his/her last negative HIV test, declare a temporary suspension of production and bring those people in for testing, then find out who that "second generation" had worked with and bring those people in for testing, so that by the time the lawful reporting requirement had kicked in, the industry could present the health department with the (hopefully negative) test results of everyone who had worked with the HIV-positive performer, thus eliminating the need for an industry shutdown.

But of course, since TTS doesn't have a doctor on staff at its L.A. office, they would not be able to prevent such a shutdown.

"Again, we're not interested in being a clinic," Pacheco stated. "I'm sorry to say that, but we're not interested in that … we're not good at it. What we're good at is providing you the best test out there. That is what we do. If you tell me I have to bring a doctor on board and I have to do follow up on talent, things like that, that's not what we do."

The question of whether talent agents should have access to their clients' test results was brought up, with Love claiming, "We won't know if you're tested or not; we have to assume you're doing your jobs correctly, throw you on set and the chance is that you've got to take the chance that the person next to you is tested because we won't have any verification yet." However, it was quickly pointed out that any performer can sign a release allowing his/her agent (or anyone else) to see the results of the person's test, though opinions differ on whether allowing agents (or anyone else) to have such information is in the best interests of the performer.

The discussion often degenerated into a shouting match, particularly toward the end of the meeting, and it's unclear whether attendees came away with an accurate understanding of the main issues involved. Hopefully, as the discussions continue, testing priorities can be agreed upon and those in authority can put aside their prejudices and consider the best interests of both the performer community and the industry at large.