Anna makes a good point about the protection of others. There are two distinct issues, men are of course vectors of the virus to women, and as such even in the cervical cancer model we need to protect them. But in the long run, as with diseases that we are protected against in this country, there is the issue of herd immunity. When enough of a population are protected, the remaining unprotected are as well. The disease really can't get a serious foothold.

I did not mean to insinuate that there are no genetic components to HPV+ SCC. Indeed, in all cancers, they are in the final analysis genetic aberrations as a disease, cascading into a mutated cell, and certainly in many that we know of there is a familial genetic trait that provides susceptibility, or conversely protection. For those of us here that are of white anglo-saxon backgrounds we are all decedents of Europeans that survived the black plague. A disease that there was no medicine nor cure for, and decimated huge populations. As a malady with no treatment or cure, the survivors of that plague had some genetic protection from the disease. Those survivors are the gene pool that colonized the Americas, and their gene pool in the broadest sense of the genetic map, is the basis of ours. We are unlikely to ever get the black plague as a result (were it still a threat today).

One irony of this is that evolution is at its basis occuring on a genetic level, small incremental change by small incremental change. That which protects you a hundred years ago, is something that may make you vulnerable to a new threat today. And so it is with the protection from black plague. Only through a lens which allows vision of very distant changes, are we able to see the results in an entire species, of what are in any singular individual, seemingly innocuous genetic changes.

Living to old age (not considering accidents), defying death from a cause that brings others down like cancer, though you smoke for a life time, all reveal a genetic predisposition for protection from the negative, and a greater likelihood of your progeny being part of the genetic map that exists a hundred years, or many generations from now.

So while we cannot tie oral cancers directly to a particular genetic aberration today, there is no question that some are predisposed to get cancer� of all types.