225% increase in oral cancer cases in the USA since 1974
50% of sexually active Americans will get HPV at some point* 

Research in the USA has found that in America oral cancer due to the human papillomaviruses  (HPV) infection is now more common than oral cancer from tobacco use.

Maura Gillison of Ohio State University said “When you compare people who have an oral infection or not … the single greatest factor is the number of partners on whom the person has performed oral sex.”

Gillison, has been researching HPV and cancer for 15 years. “When the number of partners increases, the risk increases,” she told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington.

Previous studies have suggested that people who have performed oral sex on six or more partners over a lifetime face an eight-fold higher risk of acquiring HPV-related head or neck cancer than those with fewer than six partners, she said.

Researcher Diane Harper of the University of Missouri said “I think that the head and neck cancer area will benefit because we have gone through all kinds of different laboratory techniques to make sure we are actually finding what we think is HPV and getting type-specific information to go with that.”

Sexually transmitted HPV infections are common and often asymptomatic, and untreated cases in women are the main cause of cervical cancer. Other strands of the virus cause genital warts, vaginal and penile cancers.

A recent study Efficacy of Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine against HPV Infection and Disease in Males published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the HPV vaccine could prevent 90% of genital warts in men, and the vaccine has also been approved against anal cancer in men and women.

“If you talk to health care providers and certainly parents and other educators, they are not talking to teens about oral sex, period,” said Bonnie Halpern-Felsher of the University of California San Francisco, who has studied teenagers’ attitudes and sexual behaviours.

“Teens really have no idea that oral sex is related to any outcome like STIs (sexually transmitted infections), HPV, Chlamydia, and so on.”

*US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Writer Helen Splarn. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha.
Source: WAtoday.com.au. New England Journal of Medicine