Back in December of 2013 the industry was shocked to find that one of their own tested positive for HIV. His name was TJ Cummings.
He tested positive on December 3, 2013, at TTS, at which time he was marked as unavailable in the PASS system. He tested again on December 5th, this time with Cutting Edge, to confirm his initial positive test was accurate. It was.
On December 5th, after finding out both his first and second test was positive, he tried to schedule a live webcam show with a female performer, on the 7th. She was busy that day so they rescheduled for the 8th, the next day.
This was at a time when he was considered highly contagious.
It is unclear where TJ Cummings contracted HIV, but he was a crossover performer, having done gay porn under the name Nick Steel (Nick Steal). In fact, he got his start as a gay male performer.
After testing positive for HIV TJ Cummings did not go away. He changed his twitter name to NickDiRuscio and started hitting up girls online, pretending to be a fitness model, failing to mention to the girls he’s hitting on, that he’s HIV positive.
Since nobody has heard from him in years you might ask why am I talking about this now? Well because people like TJ Cummings don’t just go away. He’s now telling people he is “cured” of HIV.
Yes, he actually said that his doctor told him he had a rare condition that allowed him to stop taking his HIV medication because he was cured.
But the truth is, he’s a liar and his lies could cost someone their life.
You can’t trust anyone you meet online. Don’t just assume they are STD or HIV free. ALWAYS GET TESTED. EVEN IF YOU AREN’T IN PORN. NEVER TRUST ANYONE.
There are two known cases of someone actually being cured of HIV. No, I’m not talking about people who take their HIV meds so their viral load is virtually undetectable, I mean actually cured.
The first case happened 12 years ago. A man who had HIV also had cancer.
In the process of treating this man’s cancer, they had to do some kind of surgery and he got a bone marrow transplant. Doctors know that the transplant was risky, with harsh side effects that can last for years and it almost actually killed the guy, but in the end, it re-armed his body with immune cells that turned out to be resistant to HIV.
The “Berlin Patient” as he was known at the time was the first known person in the world to be cured of HIV. 12 years later he’s still HIV free.
A few weeks ago it was reported that scientists have duplicated the procedure on a second page and seemed to have succeeded. This new patient, like the original also had cancer and this new patient, known as the “London Patient”, is the second person to be cured of HIV.
Both of these HIV-positive men were struggling with a lethal blood cancer, and both were saved from that cancer by transplants of blood stem cells. They both were apparently cured of HIV because the donors of those stem cells each carried rare genes that confer natural resistance to the virus.
That’s two people and you know what? Neither of them was TJ Cummings.
TJ Cummings is full of shit. He’s a liar who is not cured of HIV. Only two people in the entire world have been able to stop taking their HIV medication and not have the virus return.
As for the men who were cured, the first (the Berlin patient) stopped taking antiviral drugs at the time of this first transplant; the London Patient stayed on his anti-HIV medications throughout the first 17 months of his transplant recovery. He stopped them only 18 months ago.
Both patients received blood stem cells from donors who carried HIV-resistant genes. The so-called CCR5 mutation deletes part of a protein on the surface of blood cells that HIV uses like a mechanical gate to pry its way in and infect the cell. About 1 percent of people of northern European ancestry carry that mutation from both their mothers and fathers. Another 10 percent of people from those northern climes carry at least one of those genes.
The donors for both Berlin and the London Patient carried two copies of that mutation, one from the mother and one from the father, a “homozygous” trait that makes them virtually immune to HIV infection.
The apparent cure of a second patient shows that the Berlin patient’s success “was not an anomaly.” Yet the news is tempered by the fact that it took doctors 12 years to repeat his favorable result.
