Thread by @doctorow

As we look to how to re-establish daily contact with one another before the pandemic is fully contained, there's a useful historic precedent (and several cautions) in the measures the porn industry employs to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS.

statnews.com/2020/05/08/por…

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Every 14 days, every porn performer gets an HIV test. A single positive test shuts down all shoots nationwide. It's called the PASS program.

fscpass.com

Performers and technicians wear gloves and other PPE where feasible, and everything gets sterilized.

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But the parallels are imperfect, as is the PASS system. HIV is much less contagious than coronavirus (the sound technicians at a shoot would be at greater risk of coronavirus than from an infected performer than of HIV).

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And while the PASS system's 14-day window is a good anti-HIV measure, it isn't frequent enough to contain the spread of chlamydia and or gonorrhea, which are estimated to infect 24% of performers.

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But porn does share some important parallels with public health: just as nurses "float" from one facility to another, so do porn performers float from one set to another.

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And just as with other industries, the porn industry is relatively mobile and will relocate when regulations are deemed to onerous (when LA required condoms and permits, shoots moved out of the city).

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(Just as Elon Musk has pledged to relocate Tesla manufacturing to a state where workers' lives are cheaper).

eof/