SKIRMISHER

Recent increases in HPV-positive throat cancers could be an aftershock of changes in sexual behaviour that began decades ago. A landmark 1994 study of sexual behaviour showed that oral sex had become commonplace only in the generations born in the 1950s or later. Fewer than 60 per cent of people born in the 1930s were found to have had oral sex, compared with more than 80 per cent of people born since 1950.

“The older people simply did not do it as much,” said Edward Laumann, a University of Chicago professor of sociology who led the National Health and Social Life Survey.

“It’s a very complicated social story that nobody’s really worked out in detail,” he said.

Other causes may have contributed to the spread of HPV cancers, including the increased movement of people around the country and the world in the last half-century, experts said. Scientists aren’t even sure yet whether the virus might be spread by kissing, though data suggest oral sex is a major route of transmission.

One implication of the cancer trend is that oral sex does not constitute “safe sex,” Kanga said.

“We can’t be afraid to talk about this,” Kanga said. “The message that oral sex carries risks is just not out there.”

Conservative groups say the emergence of HPV-related throat cancer is an additional argument for abstaining from sex until marriage.

But many researchers focus on expanded use of the HPV vaccine, which since 2006 has been recommended for girls ages 11 to 12. Just as the vaccine lessens the risk of cervical cancer for those girls, it may offer protection from HPV-positive throat cancer, though studies have not yet addressed that question.

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