Study links cancer to oral sex

[Ian David]

Study links cancer to oral sex

November 17, 2005 - 10:36AM


Certain cases of mouth cancer appear to be caused by a virus that can be contracted during oral sex, a Swedish study shows.

People who contract a high-risk variety of the human papilloma virus, HPV, during oral sex are more likely to develop mouth cancer, according to a study conducted at the Malmoe University Faculty of Odontology in southern Sweden.

"You should avoid having oral sex," dentist and researcher Kerstin Rosenquist, who headed the study, told Swedish news agency TT.

More:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/17/1132016898256.html?oneclick=true


See also:

Virginity or Death!



Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof. Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid these days. No matter what the consequences of sex--pregnancy, disease, death--abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the installment plan.

Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their daughters--but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.

What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone--even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in Florida. I would really like to hear the persuasive argument that this middle-schooler with no home and no family would have been better off giving birth against her will, and that the State of Florida, which totally failed to keep her safe, should have been allowed, against its own laws, to compel this child to bear a child. She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion--but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion. Ah, Christian compassion! Christian sadism, more likely. It was the courts that showed humanity when they let the girl terminate her pregnancy.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050530/pollitt

[Retired AF Dem]

1. If this was true

I would of been dead a long time ago. :)

[hwmnbn]

3. Come here often?......

JUST KIDDING!!!!!

[still_one]

4. the article says it applies only if one of the parties caries HPV

this is not profond or rocket science.

If neither individual caries HPV then it doesn't apply

[murielm99]

2. Honor killing on the installment plan.

I will have to find my copy of the Nation and read this article.

But I plan to use that phrase the next time my fundie relatives want to argue about abortion and sex. Funny thing, that. They are always the ones who bring it up.

[awoke_in_2003]

5. Just great...

have a hard enough time getting it now (married 11 years), now we have medical proof. God, I hate doctors

[Retired AF Dem]

6. As the old joke goes

Why is the bride smiling as she is walking down the aisle? She has just given her last blow job.

[philb]

7. Cancer mostly caused by chronic exposure to carcinogens; and

usually has a related connection to parasites which affect a weakened immune system. Some cancers have a viral connection as well; which the immune system can't deal with due to weakening by exposure to toxics.