Oral sex is fueling an ‘epidemic’ of throat cancers - Doctor claims

The US and UK are suffering a throat cancer ‘epidemic’ — and experts point to oral sex as the culprit.

Dr Hisham Mehanna, from the UK’s University of Birmingham, said 70 percent of cases of throat cancer are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), a normally harmless virus that is spread sexually and has been linked to multiple forms of cancers.

Dr Mehanna said people with multiple oral sex partners have an up to nine-fold increased risk of throat cancer.

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

Dr Mehanna wrote in The Conversation: ‘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 has been due to a large rise in a specific type of throat cancer called oropharyngeal cancer.’