Tag Archives: aids healthcare foundation

Camp to become AHF Texas regional director

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Bret Camp in the Bret Camp Dental Suite at Nelson-Tebedo Clinic

Bret Camp is leaving Resource Center Dallas to become Texas regional director of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

“I will dearly miss Resource Center,” he said. “It’s meant a lot to me over the last 17 years.”

Last year, Camp left RCD to deal with B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer. After more than six months of treatment, he returned to work with a clean bill of health as the center’s health services director.

During his absence, a new dental suite was outfitted and named for him at Nelson-Tebedo Clinic on Cedar Springs Road.

Last month, AHF opened its first Texas clinic at AIDS Outreach Center in Fort Worth. Camp will work out of the office at Medical City Dallas where a second area clinic is planned. The nonprofit organization is looking to expand into Austin and San Antonio and possibly Houston in the near future.

Camp said what attracted him to AHF was how client-centered the agency is.

“AHF provides cutting-edge medicine and advocacy regardless of ability to pay,” he said.

AHF is expected to open a clinic at Medical City to serve a Far North Dallas area that currently has no AIDS services and is one of the city’s hard hit areas with new cases of HIV.

 

—  David Taffet

AOC announces partnership with AIDS Healthcare Foundation to open HIV/AIDS clinic in Fort Worth

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Allan Gould, right, executive director of AIDS Outreach Center of Tarrant County, today announced that the combined boards of AOC and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation have signed a letter of intent to plan and develop the Community Healthcare Clinic in Fort Worth specifically to offer medical treatment to people with HIV/AIDS.

Gould told Dallas Voice this afternoon that “if all goes as planned, we anticipate that the clinic will be open by April 2012.”

In a written statement released today, Gould said the clinic will “underscore AOC’s mission of being the ‘one stop shop’ addressing the HIV client’s vital medical, emotional and social service needs. He also said plans are in the works to implement a mobile health care van to meet the needs of those with HIV/AIDS living in rural areas.”

He said that estimates are the clinic will initially serve more than 400 individuals when it opens.

Based in Los Angeles, AIDS Healthcare Foundation is the nation’s largest provider of HIV/AIDS medical care, offering cutting-edge medical care to more than 27,000 people in the U.S., Africa, Central America and Asia, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay, according to AOC’s press release. In the U.S., AHF operates 14 healthcare centers and 11 pharmacies in California, Washington, D.C., and Florida.

Read Gould’s statement in its entirety below:

Continue reading “AOC announces partnership with AIDS Healthcare Foundation to open HIV/AIDS clinic in Fort Worth” »

—  admin

HIV case causes LA porn industry shutdown

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Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — An adult film performer has tested positive for HIV, causing porn producers to shut down shoots in Southern California as the diagnosis is confirmed through re-testing, according to an industry group.

Free Speech Coalition executive director Diane Duke told The Los Angeles Times on Monday that her group became aware of the HIV case Saturday.

A series of tests were being conducted on the performer to confirm the case before anyone the performer might have spread the illness to will be notified to get tested, Duke told The Associated Press.

She didn’t know how long that would take.

Duke declined to release the performer’s name, age or gender, citing the person’s federal right to medical privacy. She also declined to say how her group learned of the case.

The case was found in an out-of-state clinic that doesn’t report to California health officials, said Duke.

If the initial case is confirmed, the group will ask two generations of the person’s sexual partners to get tested, meaning those who had sex with the performer and the sexual partners of those who had sex with the performer.

The voluntary industry shutdown affects porn producers in the San Fernando Valley, the heart of the multi-billion dollar American porn industry, and includes Hustler and Evil Angel’s productions.

The porn industry was shut down similarly in late 2010, after porn actor Derrick Burts was diagnosed HIV positive.

Burts has since gone on to advocate for the mandatory use of condoms in porn with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

The health advocacy group and state workplace safety officials say state law mandates porn performers to use condoms to protect themselves under the same set of rules that require nurses to wear gloves in hospitals when dealing with bodily fluids.

Cal/OSHA is working to clarify the regulation to make it more specific to porn.

Earlier this month, the health advocacy group announced that it will gather 41,138 petition signatures to get the issue of condoms in porn on the June 2012 ballot.

The ballot measure would ask Los Angeles residents whether porn producers must require performers to use condoms on shoots as a condition of getting a filming permit.

“The question remains how many performers must become infected with HIV and other serious STDs before the industry will clean up its act and government will do the right thing?” said Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

The group has unsuccessfully pushed California and Los Angeles County officials to tighten enforcement of condom use on porn sets through legislative attempts, lawsuits and regulatory complaints.

—  John Wright

Porn industry health regs needed

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After 3 decades, California’s workplace safety officials are finally considering mandates in the porn industry, and it’s about time

DAVID WEBB  |  The Rare Reporter

After three decades of devastation wrought by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the state of California’s workplace safety officials are now pondering whether safe sex practices by the porn industry should be mandated in state code.

California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board recently released a 17-page proposal to the Associated Press that details all of the dangers porn stars and other workers on the set face from body fluids and waste matter produced during the course of the filming. The proposed mandate, which includes the required use of condoms and the utilization of other safety measures to prevent genital and oral contact with blood and other body fluids, will be discussed at a public meeting June 7 in Los Angeles.

In addition to the use of condoms, porn producers would be required to make sure condoms are not reused with multiple partners, make sure razors are not used by multiple people, make sure sex toys are sterile, showers are taken between scenes, medical services including tests and vaccines are employed and soiled laundry is handled properly.

All of this comes on the heels of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation lobbying for the state to require condoms be used on porn sets and the advocacy group’s filing of a formal complaint to the state in 2009.

In March of this year, the state board fined porn king Larry Flynt’s Hustler company $14,175 for three instances of failing to require condoms and of other health risks on the set. A lesser-known company, Forsaken Pictures, was fined $12,150 for similar violations.

The state cited the same laws that require hospitals to provide nurses and other technicians with protective tools, such as plastic gloves, to make its case against the porn producers.

And if the length of time it has taken for the governor-appointed, seven-member safety board to come up with a set of laws specifically addressing the porn industry isn’t amazing enough, the Associated Press reports that two straight porn industry hotshots are not too happy with the idea.

Flynt said porn viewers don’t want to see condoms on actors because it interferes with their fantasies. Vivid Entertainment founder Steven Hirsch warned the laws would drive California’s multi-billion dollar porn industry to other states to produce videos.

Hirsch’s comments are interesting because the queen of gay porn, DJ drag diva Chi Chi LaRue — who, in addition to directing and producing porn videos owns a sex shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood — once produced movies for a Vivid Entertainment company. She reportedly abandoned her three-year successful career in producing straight sex porn videos for Vivid Video, a division of Hirsch’s company, in 2006 because the company refused to require the use of condoms.

It seems that LaRue was reacting to what she witnessed in the late 1980s when she worked for gay porn company Catalina Video and saw many members of the gay porn industry dropping dead left and right.

I encountered LaRue in a West Hollywood gay bar about a year ago, and it was a memorable event. I was trying to get a picture of her and a few tidbits of information to write something about the experience — but she was having none of it. We parted with her thinking I was an annoying pest and my thinking she was an uppity bitch. I’m sure we were both right.

But I’ve got to commend LaRue for the stand she took about safe sex. Like LaRue, I’ve watched countless friends and other associates over the years suffer and die from HIV infections. I’ve also seen attitudes in recent years relax about the danger of HIV infections.

Too many young people simply don’t think it can happen to them, and the epidemic continues to rage.

There reportedly are still many gay porn videos being produced that do not include the use of condoms, especially now that there are so many amateurs out there with personal video cameras. Some of them are billed as “bareback” productions in an effort to entice viewers, as a scan of Internet gay porn sites recently revealed.

That’s just about the last message we need to be sending to young LGBT people, and I would like to think that porn producers would want to take a similar stand as LaRue. Of course, that’s not going to happen because we are talking about people who want to make lots of money, and some of them don’t care who gets hurt in the process.

That’s why I think the regulations in California are necessary, and I applaud the AIDS advocacy group for taking the initiative to see it happen. Actually, I think porn videos should require warnings about the mind-boggling array of infections that can be contracted during unprotected sex.

And if California’s porn producers start flocking to Texas or whatever state to avoid the regulations, I hope AIDS advocacy groups in those states follow the California group’s lead and demand the same safety regulations.

David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. Email him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com.

—  John Wright