So the follow up smoking /HPV article you refer to is not so interesting, and has been called junk science by so many. Smokers do get more HPV infections, that isn't really news - they get more of every kind of infection because of the tobacco's actions on their systems. But even if it facilitates more HPV infections, it has absolutely no bearing on where those infections cascade into oral cancers or not.

This is the really important point, and why this bit of research, from good people, to us really means nothing. I don't care how many times I get an HPV infection as long as it never becomes something else. Developing a cancer from it is still a function of genetic make up of the individual (and their resulting immune system) and has nothing to do with tobacco making getting the infection easier. In many science article you really have to read what it is stating, and what this one states is about rates of infections, which has nothing to do with rates of converting to a malignancy. You can't connect those two dots.