Patrick - HPV has been with us for a very long time. Going back to 1948 when at its peak destructiveness versions 16 and 18 were cause enough cervical cancers to make it the number one killer of women in the US that year. (It was around long before then) HPV in a retrospective study that OCF did with Maura Gillison published in the Journal of Oncology really started to get legs in the posterior mouth in the late 60"s and early 70's. This is most likely due to the quickly changing sexual behaviors that were taking place in the developed world during that period. Of course those behaviors have never gone back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet relationships.

Looking at tissue samples from the SEER database we were able to plot the steady increase in oral HPV cancers from the early 70's until today, and from that drew a trend line to 2020 which shows an ever increasing rapid ramp up of these cancers. Of course you have likely read it here before, but in this generation we can't do anything about this, but for our children and grand children the cervical cancer vaccine is likely our only hope of turning this epidemic around.