Adult film star Derrick Burts is calling for condom use on porn sets.

The 24-year-old performer -- who is known as Derek Chambers in gay films and Cameron Reid in straight films -- has outed himself as the actor who tested positive for the HIV virus in October, causing two of the industry’s biggest production companies, Vivid Pictures and Wicked Entertainment, to shut down for almost a month.

Known only as Patient Zeta at the time, Burts found out on Oct. 8 from a routine check-up at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation in Sherman Oaks, Calif., that he had contracted the virus, The Los Angeles Times reported.

After quarantining his co-stars, all of whom tested negative, the clinic reportedly told Burts they had traced the infection to someone he had performed with who was "known positive," but could not reveal his name due to patient confidentiality.

According to the Times, the gay porn industry does not require negative test results before filming.

Burts told the newspaper that he may have contracted the disease during a gay film shoot in Florida, during which time performers used condoms during intercourse but not during oral sex.

"It's very dangerous," he told the Times. "It should be required that you wear a condom on the set."

A month after being diagnosed, the clinic claimed in a statement that Zeta had contracted the HIV virus "through private, personal activity."

Burts told the Times that this was "completely false" as he had only ever slept with his girlfriend in his personal life and that she tested negative for the disease.

He also took issue with the fact that the clinic reportedly did not arrange for follow-up care and told him not to contact the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which he did anyway.

The actor reportedly identified himself as Patient Zeta to the group last week and said he wanted to speak out in favor of enforcing mandatory condom use on adult film sets.

"Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn't worth your life,” he told the Times. "Performers need to be educated."

Burts will be holding a news conference about the reforms at 10 a.m. on Wednesday

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Groups developing a gel to protect women from the AIDS virus say they are moving ahead to develop the product that was hailed as "groundbreaking" after a study on its effectiveness was released in July.

The developers, who met last week with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said the FDA informed them it would only require a limited amount of new information about the gel's safety and efficacy before considering licensing the product.

The gel, containing Gilead Sciences AIDS drug tenofovir, reduced HIV infections in women by 39 percent over two and a half years in a trial in South Africa that was called "groundbreaking by the World Health Organisation.

The FDA would require more information on whether the gel works and is safe, but will help speed up the process, said Dr. Henry Gabelnick, executive director of CONRAD, one of the groups developing the gel.

"They gave it what is called fast-track designation," Gabelnick said in a telephone interview. "That means you can report data on a rolling submission -- you don't have to wait and put everything together. Then they have six months to review the data."

The need for such a gel is compelling -- most infections with the AIDS virus are in Africa and most new cases are among women infected during sex with men. The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS infects 33 million people globally and has killed 25 million.

There is no vaccine and no cure.

Condoms can protect women and men but many African men refuse to use them and often a married woman is trying to conceive a child but risks being infected by her husband.

A gel, cream or drug-releasing ring called a microbicide could help protect against HIV while allowing a woman to get pregnant, and, if necessary, she could use the product without letting her partner know.

SECOND TRIAL

CONRAD, a division of the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, was a partner with the Centre for Programme Research for AIDS in South Africa (CAPRISA) and U.S.-based Family Health International on the study.

Gilead has licensed tenofovir for use in the gel and researchers were stunned by the findings of the study, presented to an AIDS conference in Vienna in July.

"We still have to get a final report from the CAPRISA study," Gabelnick said. But in the meantime, a second study, called VOICE, is under way.

"We are trying to do things simultaneously to the extent that it could be done," Gabelnick said.

"We are working with partners in South Africa to establish an eventual manufacturing site and distribution network."

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Transmission of the AIDS virus seems to be "out of control" among gay men in France despite an overall fall in the number of new HIV cases in the country, according to a study published on Thursday.

Scientists from the French National Institute for Public Health Surveillance found that nearly half of the 7,000 people newly infected with HIV in the country in 2008 were gay men, and the incidence among homosexual men is 200 times higher than in the heterosexual population.

Experts said the findings showed that French authorities needed to revise and renew prevention strategies and ensure they were properly targeted at groups most at risk of HIV infection.

The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS infects 33.4 million people globally. In sub-Saharan Africa, 22.4 million people have it, and Eastern Europe currently has the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world.

Thursday's study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, found that HIV in France fell significantly from 8,930 new infections in 2003 to 6,940 in 2008.

But the number of new infections among gay men was stable despite a decline in other groups, and accounted for 48 percent of new cases in France in 2008.

Non-French-nationals living in France accounted for around 23 percent of all new infections in 2008 and for 45 percent of the infections transmitted heterosexually. Most were immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers said.

The number of new infections among injecting drug users — a group in which HIV epidemics are spreading rapidly in other parts of Europe — was low and stable in France over the 5-year study period, accounting for only 1 or 2 percent of new infections every year.

"Our results provide a new perspective on the HIV epidemic in France," said Stephane le Vu, who led the research.

"HIV transmission disproportionately affects certain risk groups and seems to be out of control in the MSM population," he said, using an acronym for men who have sex with men.

Since AIDS emerged in the 1980s, 60 million people have been infected with virus that causes it and 25 million have died. HIV is spread in blood, during sex and in breast milk. Drug users can spread it by sharing needles with infected people.

In a commentary on the findings, Robert Hogg from the British Colombia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver, Canada, said the French data reflected an "unacceptably high" number of new infections among gay men worldwide.

He said authorities should seek to tackle the problem with a combined prevention approach which would include promoting prevention measures such as condom use among gay men and expanding access to AIDS drugs for all eligible HIV patients.

Recent studies have shown that treating HIV patients early in their disease and with potent cocktails of AIDS drugs not only helps them live longer but also significantly reduces the spread of the virus to others.

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American researchers are one step closer to developing a vaccine against the deadly AIDS virus.

Government scientists discovered three potent antibodies – including one that neutralizes more than 91% of HIV strains – in cells of a 60-year-old African American gay man dubbed Donor 45, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The man's body made the antibodies naturally.

Researchers are now hoping to create a vaccine that would allow anyone's body to make those antibodies. The research could pave the way to create vaccines that would be effective not just against the AIDS virus but other viral illnesses as well.

Coming up with a vaccine "will require work," Gary Nabel, who directs the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Wall Street Journal.

Added Nabel, who was a leader of the research, "We're going to be at this for awhile," before any benefits are apparent. Vaccines, thought to work by turning on the body's own ability to make antibodies, have been an important part of AIDS research.

Last year, the first HIV vaccine to show any effectiveness proved to be a disappointment. Success rates on that vaccine, following a trial in Thailand, ranged from statistically insignificant to 30%. But the discovery of these new antibodies may yield a more promising treatment.

"The antibodies attach to a virtually unchanging part of the virus, and this explains why they can neutralize such an extraordinary range of HIV strains," Dr. John Mascola, a study researcher, said in a statement, according to AOL News.

Turning the discovery of the antibodies into an effective HIV vaccine would be difficult, since researchers would have to zero in on a crucial part of the virus that the antibodies fasten onto, and then design a vaccine using that viral part to prod the body to make the antibodies found in Donor 45.

The new discovery, described in the online edition of the journal Science, comes just days before a large International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Prevention science is expected to be the focus at the meeting. More than 33 million people had HIV at the end of 2008, according to United Nations estimates reported in the Wall Street Journal, and some 2.7 came down with the virus that same year.

In the case of Donor 45, whose antibodies did not save him from getting HIV, researchers screened some 25 million of his cells to find the dozen that produced the powerful antibodies. He most likely already had contracted the virus before his body started to produce antibodies.

The man is still alive, and had been living with HIV for two decades at the time his blood was drawn.

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