You are not disagreeing with me, but restating essentially what I said based on my routine conversations with Dr. Gillison and others in the HPV research community. Everything is a best guess at this time, and none of those guesses are based in any clinical evidence. I would hardly consider the range of 5-20 years meaningful at all, and her statement reflects what she clearly has stated, they (all the current researches in this realm, not just her team) just have no real knowledge of what the situation really is. We do not even know if it actually goes latent, or if it is that people are constantly reinfected after their immune system clears the virus. For that matter if it does exist in some latent or dormant form, we have no means to detect it with certainty while it is so. We have no clue as to why it seems to persist in some and not in others. Like I said, nobody actually knows very much and there is no data to answer that question from. In your example of the 20 years past cervical cancer patient, there is no means today to know if during that period of time the virus was dormant in her, or if she did not have it at all during that time and was reinfected more recently to her oral cancer diagnosis, or what. Noone can tell you the pathway that a form of the virus might take from cervical to oral, or oral to anal, or anything.... The answer is no one knows enough to do more than speculate on possibilities at this time. I think that Gillison's answer to you of that many years in the possible span described, is her way of saying that she can't really answer your question.

The data is not drawn from the cervical world, as I have been told there is no data published which defines the actual identification of HPV exposure moment (no one until recently has been looking at this because the GYN world has not routinely been testing patients for HPV or collecting data), subsequent incubation time, or the time necessary for all the possible genetic cellular alterations necessary to occur, (and avoid immune system response), to finally become a full blown cervical malignancy. What is not known far exceeds what is known, and the answers are not immediately at hand. The question cannot be answered in any meaningful and useful manner.