The AHF is filing a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Health Department to enforce mandatory condom use or other preventative measures in the porn industry. The suit is a reaction to the HIV scare of June, when an adult film actress tested positive.

The LAC Health Department, however, does not have the jurisdiction enforce these measures. Only the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) may oversee changes to health protocols. The LAC Health Department would actually like to see mandatory condom use, and are responsible for reporting poor statistics supporting the agenda.

During the scare, Los Angeles County public health officials claimed to have found 16 (later 18) unpublicized HIV positives and 3,700 other STDs in the porn industry since 2004. Later, they admitted they had no idea what professions the patients practiced, and had only the numbers reported from the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) Healthcare Foundation.

Though AIM caters to the adult industry, they serve everyone. They also assure that including the 2004 scare, in which Darren James and five other performers contracted the virus, the actress, dubbed “Patient Zero,” is the sixth person to test HIV positive in five years, and that there is no crisis.

According to AVN, there have been fewer than 20 cases “over the industry's entire 35-plus-year existence, most of those occurring during the period before AIM existed, when HIV testing was sporadic at best and employed the unreliable Elisa method.”

AIM also points out that many of the 3,700 positives are retests of the same infection, conducted multiple times so that performers may return to work as soon as possible.

While other news sources also cite the use of a test seven days older than the 30-day voluntary industry standard, “Patient Zero” was allowed to work because of her nominal sexual partners during that time, one scene partner and one boyfriend. Both partners and their sexual contacts have all tested negative after quarantine.

Also according to AVN, AIM’s director Dr. Sharon Mitchell states that since AIM’s founding in 1998, infection rates have decreased about 10 percent.

It takes 9-11 days after exposure to test HIV-positive.