OCF helped pay for the work by Dr. D'Souza which definitively put the idea of spouses being at risk to bed for ever. Her peer reviewed published work is available in scientific form on the HPV pages of the OCF main site. But the net of it is what we have pretty much always known. People in the general population that develop HPV+ oral cancers are about .9 percent of all those infected, which is the vast majority of the US population according to the CDC and the NHAINES trial which OCF has been part of since 2008. From those studies we know that about 25 million people have a high risk HPV 16 infection orally on any given day in the US. So a person's genetic make up is the determiner of development of an oral cancer, not exposure to the oncogenic HPV16 virus which dominates oral cancers. It is also a virus which is ubiquitous in our society, and everyone is going to get it no matter who you are and who you sleep with. You will never know you had the infection, and you will clear it without ever knowing that you cleared it. This is why it is relatively unknown to most Americans.

I don't think this is news to any researcher, but we wanted the study to be done to belay any anxiety in spouses. There are 5 known cases EVER of a spouse and their husband/wife both getting oral cancers from HPV. NOTE: this is a function of genetic susceptibility and not the person that they are married to and that person's disease. So even if one of them had been married to someone else that did not have HPV+ oral cancer, they would have still developed it since they were exposed early in their lives, and they have an immune system that does not recognize the virus as a threat. My wife has been HPV16 positive off and on for at least two decades, in spite of me developing an oral cancer, she has never developed even dysplastic tissue from the infections which her body always clears in about 18 months.