What in the World is Hep C?; Raw Footage 7

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... ...... ...... ...... Take a look at those and see what you think.

Take a look at those and see what you think of them as well, and see what you think of them as well, and see what you think of them as well. This is your first piercing? Oh, my tongue is my use.

And maybe you can talk to us about cautionism, which you know about Pepsi, and I know you're not. I don't mean to reach out as an expert, but... So basically, with starting off with the piercings and the markings, what we do do is use a sterile marker. A sterile marker is skin scrap each and every time, so we're not cross-contamating the tissue.

So basically, what we do, before we do any prep work is we get our markings that way we're not going to have any chance of cross-contamating before we actually get the area sterile that we're going to be doing the piercings on. So these are going to be at one time use, we open them in front of the client and dispose of them. A lot of places we'll use markers to do their piercings and this cross-contamating between people each every single time going back and forward. So we definitely avoid doing that. We can be 100% sterile in this field, just due to the atmosphere, so we try to take every precaution we can. With all our tools, there is open in front of the client and disposed of for the client as well. They all have a sterile strip on into the client and ourself know that the actual instruments are sterile. As far as our needles go,

these again are open in front and disposed of in front in a one-time use. And we will dispose of them in our Sharpies container as soon as we're done with the piercing. So there's no chance of myself or the client getting poked. And as well, all of our jewelry that we use on a regular basis, we keep sterile and ready. They have a usually shelf life of three months inside the autoclave bag. And of course we date everything, mark everything for the client and for ourselves. It's changed lives throughout the procedure.

We try to do it between every four minutes if feasible, if not in the middle of a natural procedure. It's not able to do so. Now what we're going to do real quick. Thank you. I got originally into this field due to my nursing.

I was actually going from my RN. My roommate worked this establishment years ago. I came to work with one day and fell in love with the atmosphere and the safe practices that this place has. There are a ton of shops that do not take universal precautions. That's there for how the hepatitis is mainly spread for not taking those precautions. As far as a shelf life, it's debatable as far as a shelf life for anywhere from 60 to 90 days,

even longer, as far as my knowledge, they actually do not have an exact date, but it's basically the cross-contamination and infecting the actual open wound, such forth, any type of bodily fluids. And what do you know about the profession in the old days? I mean, there were obviously four people who have tried to see existed. There were a lot of piercings and tattoos done and there were some people who were infected. Not, there wasn't much education on the subject in those days, as far as any type of universal precautions go.

And this industry were constantly learning new things. So back then it wasn't really too much of a main concern. It was kind of the old school sailor Jerry type of stuff. You know, the guy's going to port and get a tattoo. And piercings really weren't something that people were doing at that time. And of course in different cultures, piercings have been around for generations, no executive course on it too. So it's just all in how you also take care of it too, because you have the people out there and what is it, you know, different cultures, Africa, etc. And, you know, they pair with sticks, stones, they cut themselves and do their markings with sharpened stones. And they seem actually a lot of times to feel okay, but therefore they don't have the education that we have as far as taking universal precautions. And I'm sorry, I don't know what the condition is. Oh, safety.

So tell me why you're getting a person. I just like the way they look. Did you ever have any concerns about, you know, diseases? Oh, no. I trust you. You're great. I'm just actually doing my second markings here. And as far as the piercings go, of course, we've said different cultures have different reasons for doing them. Mainly in our culture, it's my belief that we do them just for the purpose of aesthetics only. There are some piercings that they have that are made to cause sensations and pleasures. But it's a very, it's a rarity in my experience and that actually occurs.

So, CC, I'm not even trust Joe, but had you any knowledge about hepatitis or any infectious disease you can be past because you're a person with your attention? Oh, not really, actually. Like I knew if they don't throw away the needles, but of course you can get something. You think there's a general knowledge in what your friends talk to me about what your friends talk about when they get piercings or tattoos. They have any, they ever talk about infectious disease. Well, I just know that there's something they said they want to do because they don't think they're away the needles and the reason. A lot of people, a lot of shops just do the cost if they don't have a high overhead.

They will reuse their tattoo needles. They will take the step to auto favor and then they will reuse them because it saves them money. Which is something that definitely don't want to practice. Also, you know, take some effect on the way the tattoo is going to come out as well as pardon the needles. Excuse me, it's possible to squeeze right away. So, if you were to think about some of the majority of tattoo problems in this country, do you think today? I would like to think that most places do follow that. Like I said, there's a lot of mom and pop shops where they're really not regulated. And due to the lack of regulation, people do get lazy and they do try to cut costs in corners where they can.

And that is where it puts the client and send themselves as an artist at risk. I mean, here in Albuquerque, we're at 53 shops in Bernalillo County. 53 shops is a lot of shops, you know, so per capita we have a lot. And a lot of them are as if you go and check them out, little holes in the walls. I'm not really experiencing no apprenticeship being served whatsoever. So, it is, it's a big concern. And it all comes down to your city or state regulations and actually following up and regulating. Here in Albuquerque, our city of Albuquerque environment of health, they do excellent, I think, at going around and regulating on the campus. They're starting to even do better. As March 24th, they had a- Let me about that again, because Bob was a roller in terms of what you know about the regulations in Albuquerque and the state and the state market. The city of Albuquerque is doing a great job at regulations and they're constantly educating themselves.

And us in the body art industry. Now, at the state, they just had a meeting on the 24th of March. And to further stricten the rules of the body art industry and the regulations and procedures. On the state fairgrounds, the state property that ladies have been purchasing at the flea market for years. So, this young lady, this older lady, she produces an unsterile environment with the dirt flying around. She doesn't have an autoclave, but it isn't in trailer and it's just not a sterile room. It's very porous. As you can see in this room, we try to keep everything as an on-force as possible. We have the search goal still up on the walls, so everything is wipeable, wipeable surface. Of course, with her, the state property and procedures like that definitely can be sterile. There's going to be cross-contamination there. Also, you take into effect, you have age as a big thing. People, there's no state law right now that requires a certain age to pierce somebody.

I consider nipples genitals in my book and whether it's a male or female, I will not pursue anyone under 18, even with a parent or a legal guardian. A lot of places will do it. They want the money. Again, it comes down to the dollar. They'll take a 15-year-old and pierce their nipples. I think it's just inappropriate. At age, you have a maturity factor on the healing process because it is an open wound until the fistula is completely formed. Even after the healing process is occurred, you can still cause irritability, infection, and trauma to the body. The maturity factor is the big thing for me, myself and my staff here do not pierce anybody under 16 years of age unless it's earlobes. With parent consent or not, it's just our shop ethics here. Just nice, slow breaths, some through your nose and not through your nose. All the tools that we use too, as far as even with the toothics, the q-tips, rubber bands, we autoclave.

That weighs a little pre-clockage that's set up and we don't have to reach over and grab something in this area and then come to a sterile area and pierce. Alright, nice and relaxed. Nice, slow breaths, some through your nose and not through your nose. Going to get a nice, good breath in. Beautiful. Nice and relaxed.

Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed.

Nice and relaxed. Nice and relaxed. Nice and impressed. Nice and relaxed. It's actually internally threaded, so when this goes through the client, it is a nice smooth transfer. The threading will actually be right here, I'll set it down, which is in and on that. The threading will actually be on the part that we thread onto. It's a more expensive jewelry course, but it's safer for the client. A lot of places will buy quantity, like malls, they buy quantity, not quality, and they have externally threaded jewelry, so the threading is on the shaft.

When you're putting that through somebody, because you put all microscopic cuts and tears through the tissue as you're going through, and then you also have to worry about porous metals. This is a vacuumed metal, where it is not porous, so it's not going to absorb any limb suppression your body puts out, or any foreign matter that's going to partner and become able to do it, so if you have the client too, the reason why I use these forceps and we call these one's foresters, to minimize any tissue movement, you never know when a client is actually going to jump or move due to the trauma that there is occurring. A lot of pictures think it's actually kind of cool to go ahead and do everything free

hand, so they don't have to utilize utensils or just so you look good for appearances. I like just to do this as well for that one reason. Are you ready? Yeah. You're going to give me a nice big breath in, and exhale, beautiful. Yeah, I think the client hurt more than that, that's what Pearson does, I don't know if it's a bad but that one hurt, but it's not too bad. I'm just going to thread this on and view. We're going to be done.

I'm going to give it a nice look for our cleaning. So this is pretty good business, it is, when I first got into this business, it's been almost eight years now. I thought that it would be kind of a fat, it would come in as of 2006, it was 3% of our population had some type of body modification tattoos or other ones, and it's constantly growing. We see this industry growing and definitely every single year, and a lot of it is due of

course to TV. You have the sports figures, all those guys, you can't see basketball player or football player, et cetera, without a tattoo or some sort, tattoos of course, the more popular one in sports, you can't repair things. All right, we're going to clean you up. So do you think there's more than the sports, is it a clear thing you see it in different age groups, is it across the board talking about that? Well from what I've seen as far as the tattoos go up, it's mainly fraternities, college football players per se, they do a lot of brandings on their bodies, and it is, it's a click.

So it's definitely peers for sure, and it's a choice you make and pretty much get stuck with. You know, I myself of course like it, because this is what I'm into, even in the 1970s, you didn't see hardly anybody walking around with any type of tattoos, and if they did, it was to be covered up, and our culture today is to be exposed, like this gym lady here, she wears it a low cut jeans in the shirt, so she can show off her tattoos and her piercings, and it's actually kind of one big click as well, you know, when you see somebody out there in the public, you know, you kind of smile each other and you're like, hey, nice work, and same match up, where'd you get that done, you know, and so, and the people that don't have them, of course, are usually a little bit more on the shunned part of it, so, which is not always good, but it's always a prospect for a kind.

I'm going to do a series just using some saline, like with the saline, you can buy bottles of saline, of course, sodium chloride, oh, at the stores, it's much cheaper than doing it individually, packaged like this, but, of course, again, going into the cross-contamination. And, like this, if you think there will be a lot of bleeding, there's not, and the reason is, is we use the same 14 on 14, it's a 14 gauge needle, these are 14 gauge piece of jewelry.

A lot of places, in a lot of experience here, there's, and body wrists will use overgaging, so they know they will make a transfer, and using overgaging something is causing more trauma than necessary, so with this, he's all pretty much minimal bleeding, just spotting. How do you know what spots to hit, so you don't cause damage, or you're hit something? Are there certain... It comes... Absolutely. You have arteries, you know, in the neck, you have, of course, you know, you can pop through, you know, blood vessels, you can go through certain veins, of course. You don't want to, but, you know, everything, it heals itself, a lot of people do the tongue splitting, cut it right down the middle, two muscles, but it is, it can cause long-term paralysis in the tongue. Not me, myself, that's why I like to, even, through my anatomy book, and I'll go over the anatomy book and show them, the part of the body that we're doing, and what the chances are of long-term or short-term effect to the piercing.

The only one is cheek piercings. You have your salivary glands. If you pierce through the piercing, you miss the salivary gland. It's okay, but in due time, you can actually wear it down to where it actually gets the salivary gland, and therefore it ruptures, and then, basically, from that point, you usually have to get a carrest, and it causes a, you know, a lot of times an internal infection, and with an oral piercing, you know, of course, that's a little bit more harsh. You are done, Madam? We're going to do the H2O motion, that's great, and I got, yeah, I go check it out, which I think. What do you think? Do you have to save up a long time?

Oh, my nose, yeah. Well, first of all, you know, I don't want anything to touch here, so once I make a setup, I'm not going to put my coffee cup or anything down here, and, you know, cross contaminate my setup for the beginning. Our stuff that we do, we use, are the tubes, and, because we're not a clave, there's a little indicator on every little package that says they've been exposed to the right amount of steam and pressure, wearing what they call a biological monitoring program,

which is we send a sport test away monthly to a laboratory, so they just let us know and reassures that our autoclids are working, get to the certain temperature and certain amount of pressure, just a needle right there, and now it is. We are blessed by the fact that we don't have to make our own needles and sterilize them ourselves. Now they'll do them for us, and we just buy them pre-sterilized and pre-packaged, which are super nice. Well, so we don't get anyone a disease, you know, it's all about the preventive of a disease transmission, like with our tubes, there can be some residue, some blood, if you were

just to use this and use this on your next client, that's cross-medicating, that's disease transmission, and we do everything we can to prevent that. We have an autoclave, your own premise, too, actually, we're in a biological monitoring program, and then we'll send our sport test monthly to a laboratory just to make sure they are working, because what's the point of autoclaving stuff, if they're not doing the right job. So they actually send us spores in a little package, and we run them through with our stuff, and they get them at the laboratory, and they make sure that they're dead. And for our inks, we put them in these single-use little cups here, so we can never take from a, what they call a common well, someone went for it here, that's it, so anything that's been used here is never going to go back into the well.

Well, when I started here tattooing 10 years ago, we didn't have regulations imposed by the state or the city. So we had a common knowledge about disease transmission and how to prevent it, but there weren't really set rules. So about seven years ago, we had a form of coalition of tattoo artists and body gursors, and we had to let our voice be heard of what we thought was acceptable and unacceptable in the community, so we got with the city and regulations were formed. And now we're all regulated as individual artists and as a facility. You know, my permits right up there hanging on my wall too.

So technically, if it's a licensed shop, you're going to get a clean tattoo, hopefully, if the city's doing their job and making sure they're sending away their sport tests, monthly, and their autoclaves are working. So you might not get the best tattoo out of every shop, but you're going to get a clean one. And that's what it's all about really. It's about safety on our part and our clients, because the last thing we want to do is, you know, give a disease to somebody, then we've got a business, there's so when we're going to get there, I don't know what to do with it. City bucks. What's up, girl? How you doing?

Yeah. That's okay. Are you filming? I love it. I know. I just stopped the shirt right on you. I got it. Thank you. I can. Thank you. Thank you. I have no idea. I think you. I think you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Leaving a log Jeremy, because those guys have their stuff in there. Thank you. What's up, Zachary? No. No. No. No. I would give it to Amelia West. I would give it to Amelia West. Yeah. You better settle for Amelia. You can give it to me. I'm not going to do it, okay? Yeah.

Yeah. Did anything we can't sterilize? We can sanitize with mountainside too, so that's good stuff. We're cleaning surfaces. So tell me about the aesthetic that you get involved. Even in high school, I had a friend who tattooed himself and always built machines. So I was always around the mechanical aspect of it. And I loved getting tattoos. My first one I was 17. And I probably didn't actually apply my first tattoo when I was probably about 22, 23. And I still wasn't really into it.

I mean, I loved getting them. I was enthusiast. I was a collector and took me a little bit to actually want, you know, become an artist. I was always drawing, always painting in school, never really stopped in high school. And it was just a natural progression to actually do them. Just for the love of it, that's what really made me do it. You know, I hear people say, well, it's a good living or, you know, it did for the money. But I could care less, you know, I love what I do. I do what I love. And I've been here 10 years enough. It's God's will and maybe I'll be here another 10. I love that. So, so do you think? Do you feel other tattoos growing a lot of pop shops? Tell me about what you think goes on in the places that are not as committed as you guys are. Well, I think even if it's a little biker shop, you know, I think they may have a good understanding of cross-contaminating and sterilization procedures.

So, I don't think that's the key issue of places to stay away from. I mean, it's, I think it's more the homemade tattoo or the, you know, kitchen, kitchen tattoos, you know. I don't necessarily attack anyone, but, you know, say, people getting that a gel and they learn how to tattoo. And then they come out and they're building a machine and they're building their own needles, you know, sharpening the tar strings. That's what I'd be worried about. People that don't have the knowledge of, for the preventive disease transmission and tattooing. That's what I'd be really scared about. I mean, I'd go into a little biker shop any day that we can get a tattoo. As long as I have a lot of clip on premise. It's the homemade stuff that I'll stay away from. You know, I never give anything that gel, not that I've ever been gel, but if I was, the last thing I would do is let anyone poke me with a needle because I have potatoes, you know.

I don't think HIV's concerned because what I understand is you have to actually have, like, certain amount of blood, like drops of blood transmitting back and forth to actually get something like that. Hepatitis is the concern. Are you ready, Jackie? Yeah. Come on in, girl. All right. Thank you. This is Ms. Jackie. All right. And Jackie, I'm Ben. Bobby. I'm just a nausea. And I don't know if you understand. I just want to make sure you understand it there. I just want to tell you why I asked some questions. Can I be over here in the corner, but it might be pretty tight. Or I can ask them for that.

I can ask them for that. Let's see. Take a look at that in the mirror and if we need to go up or down or left or right. Maybe just a little down. A little lower. I don't know. So why are you doing this, John?

Why don't you just talk about what you're doing and what the process is. Here, we're just placing this done so long that we have a nice guideline of exactly where the tattoo is going to be. You want to take a look at that in the mirror. And it's really convenient because we can move this little thing around until it's absolutely perfect, is that awesome? I don't want to go up. I'm caring about it. Looking at it anywhere you want. Maybe just a little bit more lower. I'm scared, John. Do you have tattoos before? John treats me nice. I didn't even know that she was looking for that.

I think I like that. Is that awesome? All right, I'll put it down a bit on your hand so we don't get any ink on your clothes. I need one to do a hollow in the center, just a little while.

All right, you know what's going on, John. You can even stop, you let me know. Just stay real still for me. I'm going to take a look at that. 15 minutes.

I'm going to take a look at that. I'm going to take a look at that. I don't know a lot about it.

What I really know is the prevention of transmission about that. I know the basics. I know the symptoms, you know, the jaundice and the eye. I have anything with us to deliver. But, you know, we practice, you know, into course. But, I know, you know, that's what I got about around.

I know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, this is, no matter what it is. All right, you're puncturing, tattooing, you know, drawing blood. I would imagine now that it's a really interesting, intravenous drug use, you know, and people that aren't caring about it, having brand-new sterilized needles.

Do you feel like you're doing the blood detection on text), you know, doing the pastek years? Well, we will do this, and this is, you know, what are you doing to get those your So I imagine that there's a lot of problems in prison. Can you tell me about that? Can people imagine that? Should they have a really high risk category there? Can they talk to it in their cell? Whatever equipment or instruments they can make, or if you get their hands on, I don't think that's a bad idea. Of course you're young needles are one-time-use-only and they go right into a sharps container.

And this goes off. I've even heard of people in jail who I'm on. So the next time they get tattooed, they have their own needle, which is pretty horrible too. I don't know how many tattoos do you think, John?

Can you have your ribs on both sides, the day breaks, tattoo your back, I touch your stars. What do you mean about eight? I don't know, I just wanted one. And a lot of my friends had given themselves tattoos in like middle school, but I think anist was not part of that crowd. I didn't want to mess up tattoo. I wanted something that I was like. So I waited until I was eighteen. I'm twenty-four.

I'm a student at UNM. I have a work study job. Nothing too fancy. I'm trying to get my degree in chemistry. I eventually want to be a doctor. One day I hopefully got a med school. And I also like work here. So I kind of know the upkeep of the job.

I don't really know much about it. I actually have a friend who has HIV, so but he's got it through tattoos of nothing like that. I have a fairly educated group of friends.

I think people are more scared to get AIDS through transmission of trying needles and everything like that. I didn't take all of that. But you just have to focus past the pain. I don't know how it's going to look when it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.

I don't know how it's done. I don't know how it's done.