Do not discuss at the dinner table

A new study should finally convince parents to get their boys vaccinated against HPV

Slate talks about evidence regarding the connection between HPV and increasing oral cancers in men.

Although the idea sounds convincing, when they find HPV in the tumours, the second page of the article makes a good point about another puzzle:

It's easy to see why the notion that oral sex can give you cancer is so attractive. It makes for an irresistibly lurid headline, of course, and it appeals to the secret Victorian hidden less or more deeply in all of us. (Everything fun has a price—everything!) And to be fair, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It's well understood that HPV is transmitted through other kinds of intimate contact, such as vaginal sex. HPV seems to grow quite well on mucous membranes, those nonskin tissues that line the mouth, nose, vagina, anus, and a few other anatomic areas, and which may touch quite a bit during oral sex.

As an explanation for the uptick in oropharyngeal cancers, though, oral sex has one glaring problem: HPV-positive head and neck cancer is, inexplicably, a guy's disease. If oral sex were driving the issue, wouldn't we see a commensurate rise in HPV-positive tumors among women?

Even if the explanation was an upswing in bisexual behaviour in men in the last few decades, you would think the rate should be higher in women than men if only one form of oral was the cause.

All a bit of a mystery.