When Michael Douglas announced that he had throat cancer, it came as something of a surprise that he thought there was only one culprit: oral sex. While it might seem at first that Michael Douglas was a delusional man, it become clear that what he saying was actually guided by genuine science. While he later stated that the cancer he had was tongue cancer rather than throat cancer, the point still stands that the evidence is now mounting up that giving oral sex leads to a number of different cancers in men.
There has been a huge spike in the number of head and neck cancers that have been linked to HPV over the past twenty years. It is beginning to raise alarm bells that we may need to worry about the risk of sexually transmitted infections and their potential ability to cause cancer in men. Indeed, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, between the years of 1988 and 2004, head, neck and throat cancers that tested positive for the human papilloma virus were seen to rise an astonishing 225 per cent. This is very worrying news indeed as it seems these levels of cancer are likely to continue to rise.
In fact the authors of the study go so far to argue that within the next decade the number of incidents of such cancers will overtake that of cervical cancer. It’s also true that the majority of those cases are going to be in men and will be caused by giving oral sex. This is a point that is often missed in public talk about the HPV infection. And also remember that there is a vaccine that can prevent it.
There has been recent controversy over comments that were made by the presidential candidate Michele Bachmann about the HPV vaccine, the major aspect was squarely on young women and cervical cancer. But HPV, and specifically usually a strain called HPV-16, also causes oropharyngeal and anal cancer. This is a fact that is not often reported in the media because medical organizations, the government and academics do not want to get themselves locked into a debate about peoples sexual practices.
Until very recently, cancers of the head and neck were usually diagnosed in older people – in this instance, those with an average age of 60. Those types of cancer were usually caused by smoking or drinking too much alcohol. These types of exposures are likely to take around 20 years or more to cause the disease to occur. And, they typically didn’t test positive for HPV markers. In fact, the incident of HPV-negative head and neck cancers declined by more than 50 percent during the 16-year study period, mostly due to declines in smoking and other forms of tobacco use.
But it now seems that we are seeing the average age of head and neck cancer patients drop as increasingly younger people are beginning to develop HPV-caused cancers resulting from sexual exposure. Oral sex is thought to be one of the serious primary causes of this. Unfortunately one of the solid facts of the problem is that the best way to prevent the spread of HPV-caused cancer is to avoid the kind of practices that put you at risk. These are namely oral and anal sex – and to try to tell people that they can’t have sex in a certain kind of way would be an extremely unpopular move given how these are very mainstream forms of sexual contact. It will be interesting to see if further ideas are produced.