According to a new study, rising rates of oral cancer can be largely attributed to HPV – the same sexually transmitted virus responsible for a large segment of the cervical cancer cases in women.
As per reports published by the National Cancer Institute in 2007, nearly 65 percent of oral cancer tumors were linked to HPV.
"We're looking at non-smokers who are predominantly white, upper middle class, college-educated men," Brian Hill, the executive director of the Oral Cancer Foundation, told AOL News.
"When the No. 1 cause of your disease goes down [tobacco use], you would expect that the incidence of disease would go down, but that hasn't happened," he said. "In our world, this is an epidemic."
Over the past few years a massive effort to get females between the ages of 11 and 26 vaccinated for HPV has occurred. Now, researchers are wondering if they made a mistake not urging males in the same age group to get vaccinated as well.
Dr. Jennifer Grandis, a vice chairwoman for research at the University of Pittsbugh, said this much to AOL News:
"The thinking is changing," Grandis told AOL News in a phone interview. "But at the time [the vaccine] was licensed, there wasn't such an awareness about head or oral cancers or a willingness to accept that males played a part in the transmission of the virus," she said. "I think this idea that we only protect our daughters with the vaccine is nuts anyway, particularly because they're having sex with our boys."
