The link is bad in your posting, but that is academic since you can do a Goggle search and find tons of labs willing to do PCR tests for anyone - including the public. But more than that, the test is only looking at a site that you choose to swab, and the cells that happen to get picked up in your swab, which may or may not be representative of the tissue in question. Which anatomical site are you going to swab? If you swab more than one site, say the right tonsillar pillar and the right cheek, and you get a positive back, which site did it come from? Don't know. So let's say you only do one site, how many 140 dollar tests to isolate all the possible locations in the mouth are you willing to pay for?

We are seeing many tonsillar cancers which appear completely occult in the oral environment even when a positive metastasis to a cervical node has been identified. These are predominantly HPV related. But tonsillectomies on these patients (and there are a ton of them) find SCC inside the tonsil..... nothing on the surface. How does that work with your surface swab idea? It does not. All cancers start in the basal cells, deep below the surface. One of the things we are finding about HPV+ cellular changes, is that they too start deep in the tissue in the basal cells, but unlike the normal cascade of cellular events that ends with a migration of the cell to the upper epithelium where it produces a visible lesion or precancer, HPV+ cells do not in many cases. This essentially means that there is right now, no early detection for these cancers in the oral environment like there is in tobacco etiology OC. This is a huge problem. One that in those of us who cannot be protected by vaccination, there is no solution for today.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is done by a ton of labs. But the interpretation and collection issues are complex. Your 140 dollars may not buy you anything useful, and were you positive for HPV, the question would be what does that mean to you? It is the PERSISTENCE of infection that puts people at risk for malignant development, in cervical or oral cancer. So a single capture / slice of time result isn't necessarily of any value. Your immune system may deal with it. We (medical science) do not understand the complete life cycle of HPV 16 to the extent that we need to, to make intelligent recommendations at this time. Believe me we are working with the company that has the only FDA approved HPV test for cervical cancer to create a panel for oral HPV detection. These guys are brilliant, and it is not as simple as getting a PCR test.