Guide to managing oral HPV, throat cancer

Today, many people ignorantly suffer from a form of throat cancer that has been linked to HPV (human papilloma virus), a sexually transmitted disease. It is important to know that those infected by HPV live it with for many years without any symptoms. Infections can come and go completely undetected, frequently disappearing without any treatment. It has been documented to take as long as 15 years from infection to cancer in some people. There are different types of HPV. One of the basic HPV classifications is the risk of cancer. HPV can be classified as low-risk or high-risk. HPV can cause many different types of cancer, including cervical and other genital cancers like vulvar, vaginal and penile cancer; oral cancers (including throat, mouth and tonsillar cancer); colorectal and anal cancers; even bladder cancer. Commenting on the September 2013 issue of the journal Oral Oncology, authors including; Fakhry and D’Souza identified some interesting statistics about HPV in mouth