“HPV and Throat Cancer: The Link Between Oral Sex and Cancer”

Cases of throat cancer are on the rise in the United States and Britain, and some experts point to oral sex as the cause.

Specialists say it is the HPV virus. The seemingly harmless human papillomavirus is a virus that spreads sexually and is associated with several forms of cancer.

According to Dr. Hisham Mehanna from the University of Birmingham, the human papillomavirus (HPV) is responsible for around 70% of throat cancers.

There is a nine times greater chance that people who have multiple sexual partners will get throat cancer, the doctor warns.

There is a vaccine for HPV, but only 54 percent of Americans have received it — well below the 80 percent figure considered to be a threshold for population safety.

“Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in throat cancer in the West, to the extent that some have called it an epidemic. This was due to a large increase in a specific type of throat cancer called oropharyngeal cancer,” Dr. Mehanna said, according to The Conversation.

Oropharyngeal cancer is the most common type of throat cancer. It occurs in the tonsils and the back of the throat. Doctors believe that HPV infection is the biggest risk factor for the development of this disease.

“HPV is sexually transmitted. For oropharyngeal cancer, the main risk factor is the number of sexual partners throughout life, especially oral sex. “Those who have six or more oral sex partners in their lifetime are 8.5 times more likely to develop oropharyngeal cancer than those who do not practice oral sex,” said Dr. Hisham Mehanna, a surgeon at the University of Birmingham, UK, acc Daily Mail.

More than 50,000 cases of oral or oropharyngeal cancer are diagnosed in the US each year, with the disease causing more than 10,000 deaths annually. In the UK, head and neck cancers combined are responsible for around 12,000 diagnoses and 4,000 deaths a year.

But the number of cases is increasing, up to 1.3 percent in women and 2.8 percent in men, according to the American Cancer Society.

Doctors believe that oral sex is the risk factor behind most cases of throat cancer – surpassing smoking, alcohol consumption and an unhealthy diet.