If the students read Slate, then they may challenge the predicate of your presentation. My thoughts on this are very similar to that in the article posted above in this thread from Slate and set forth below in an excerpt of Dr. Kent Sepkowitz of Memorial Sloan-Ketterings Cancer Center:
[quote]If the past is any indication, though, I suspect a more eyebrow-raising angle will overshadow this important public health story. Since the link between
HPV and oral cancer was first floated 10 years ago, the media has tended to focus on just one aspect�the possible connection between oral sex and the rise in oropharyngeal cancers. However, there's no definitive evidence yet of a causal relationship between the activity and the disease. That's not to say that people shouldn't exercise a reasonable amount of caution when having oral sex. But when popular opinion (particularly in matters sexual), wags science, no one benefits.
It's easy to see why the notion that oral sex can give you cancer is so attractive. It makes for an irresistibly lurid headline, of course, and it appeals to the secret Victorian hidden less or more deeply in all of us. (Everything fun has a price�everything!) And to be fair, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It's well understood that
HPV is transmitted through other kinds of intimate contact, such as vaginal sex.
HPV seems to grow quite well on mucous membranes, those nonskin tissues that line the mouth, nose, vagina, anus, and a few other anatomic areas, and which may touch quite a bit during oral sex.
As an explanation for the uptick in oropharyngeal cancers, though, oral sex has one glaring problem:
HPV-positive head and neck cancer is, inexplicably, a guy's disease. If oral sex were driving the issue, wouldn't we see a commensurate rise in
HPV-positive tumors among women? Unless the announcement was screened out by my workplace email filter, I don't think anyone has demonstrated that cunnilingus is being practiced more often than fellatio.
Furthermore, many people with
HPV-positive head and neck tumors deny having had much oral sex. According to a 2010 review of several studies on the topic, more than half of such patients reported five or fewer lifetime oral sex partners, and 8 to 40 percent said they had never had oral sex.
Finally, the argument that oral sex is driving the rise in these cancers carries the implicit suggestion that oral sex patterns of recent years vary considerably from previous generations. Among the many things we don't know about our forebears, what they did and didn't do in the bedroom surely ranks near the top. And it always is a bad wager to bet against the likelihood that everyone, in every decade, was having all types of sex, and as often as possible. [/quote]
As I posted before on this thread, the time and energy spent on trying to convince young people not to have oral sex would be much better spent on getting them all vaccinated. IMO The real "risky behavior" is not to get the vaccine.
Charm
