Hello Brian, I appreciate your thorough answer greatly, thank you for all the information you've provided me with. (coming back here after typing my thing out) Now I see that you are the founder of the forum and also a survivor, thank you for your work sir!

I do have a few follow up questions;

> So to your specific question. HPV is not a systemic infection. It does not travel from the cervical area for instance to the oral environment through some pathway or mechanism in your body. Each site that is know to be vulnerable to infection requires it’s own exposure.

That is awesome! However to be sure I understand this correctly, does this mean that if a female patient with a diagnosed cervical HPV-16, who for this example we are sure that never caught oral HPV, if that patient takes Gardasil 9 for example while being still positive or not (does it matter?) for HPV-16, the vaccine which covers, well all current vaccines cover HPV-16, will this person be able to protect himself from HPV-16 in the oral cavity after gaining immunity? If this is true, then I am confused, how does the vaccine protect us at all sites, does naturally having and clearing genital means that one will be naturally protected in the genital, but not oral once again.

Also, I see that nearly always it is HPV-16, does literature found any other type, regardless how rare that is? And if testing is not approved, how do we isolate HPV-16 as the main cause and we proof that it is the one that causes it always?

Also what are the transmission rates of both genital and oral, or at least oral more specifically and for the transmission to happen - must visible lesions be present?

I know that about 3% woman and 10% men currently in the US do have oral HPV, but when I read the studies it becomes cloudy, studies of such type I believe are hard to make, additionally it seems like there are no approved tests for oral HPV and in these studies they use for DNA/mRNA swab tests. So I wondered, if there are some FDA approved tests that work on swabbing, like the cobas or the Aptima, if these are swabs for epithelial tissue, why can't they be used in the oral cavity, does the oral cavity needs to have lesions to be measured at all? Or even penile or anal regions? How come then there are studies talking about transmission rates, if as I've seen HPV lesions in the oral cavity don't just pop up in a a few months, all too confusing?

I see there is a lot of literature and I have read some, but I am afraid that I will need to spend eternity and still not be qualified to answer these above questions. frown

Last edited by cocoamber; 01-11-2022 11:11 AM.