Oral sex is a thing of interest to a lot of people today. The
question “what is wrong with oral sex?” is one I have received times
without number through my mail box, and in my quest to find answer to
this question, I stumbled on this write-up on the internet by “Women’s
health”. I hope it will satisfy your curiosity on the subject matter.
Please enjoy it.
Mische Eddins, 37, woke up with a head cold. Or what seemed like one. Post-nasal drip, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes. No big deal seeing as a bug was going around.
“I had just been bragging to my friends about how I’d managed to avoid getting sick,” she says. “But I was healthy, so it all passed quickly.” Everything, that is, except a swollen node on the left side of her neck, which, months later, hadn’t gone away.
The new year rolled round and the little bump was still there. Without an appointment, Mische walked into her doctor’s office and left with a script for antibiotics.
There was no improvement. She then went from doctor to doctor and finally, six months after that seemingly innocuous head cold, she had a PET/CT scan.
The results were shattering: Mische had stage-three cancer, which had spread from her tonsil to her lymph nodes.
Within hours, her doctors had scheduled a tonsillectomy and were talking about chemo and radiation. Someone suggested she prepare a will.
“I was floored,” she says. “A will?” A professional singer, Mische exercised almost every day, ate a mostly organic diet, didn’t drink heavily and had never smoked as an adult. Even her doctors were stymied.
Searching for answers, one doctor tested Mische’s cancer cells for the human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted infection notoriously linked to cervical cancer.
Quite a shock
Mische was a bit taken aback as she’d spent the past 16 years in two monogamous relationships and was fastidious about getting annual Pap smears, which had never been abnormal.
Why were they now testing her mouth? Her doctors explained the worrisome new link between oral cancer and HPV, which can be transmitted to the mouth through oral sex. And indeed, she tested positive. Her cancer was HPV-related.
Ten years ago, oral cancer among women was practically unheard of. Patients were nearly always male and over 50 years of age, heavy smokers or drinkers, or both.
(When actor Michael Douglas, 66, was diagnosed with the illness last year, the media pointed to his longtime half-a-pack-a-day habit.)
But according to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, there has been a major upswing in HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer, a deadly disease often found in the base of the tongue and the tonsils.
In fact, up to 20 per cent of all oral cancers are now HPV-related, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and about 25 per cent of cases occur in women, some as young as 19, says oncologist, Dr Gregory Masters.
But how could HPV be causing so many problems? It’s something doctors and health experts have long feared, thanks to the rampant spread of the virus.
You’ve probably heard the stats: one in 35 women in South Africa (SA) will develop cervical cancer, predominantly caused by HPV.
About 21 per cent of SA women are estimated to harbour a cervical HPV infection at any time. What’s more, the virus – which can have zero symptoms or bloom into visible warts – will affect up to 80 per cent of sexually active women.
In the majority of cases, the body’s immune system will clear up the HPV within two years (there is some debate over whether the same HPV infection can return to cause cervical lesions later, but research is in the early stages).
However, some infected SA women – around 6 000 per year – will not clear and may develop cervical cancer. This has prompted the WHO to recommend that girls be vaccinated for HPV by age 12.
To date, safe-sex campaigns have blamed the spread of HPV on unprotected vaginal sex. But it’s now clear that the disease can be contracted orally too.
And that’s where things got dangerous for Mische Eddins and thousands of others. Their mouths were infected with HPV-16, the strain that most doctors believe is responsible for the majority of HPV-related oral cancers.
How long HPV-16 lingers in the mouth before turning into cancer is uncertain. But what is evident is that more than 14 percent of cases aren’t caught until the very late stages, possibly because some doctors are slow to consider the cancer in young female patients.
Since HPV-related oral cancers don’t affect the traditional group of those at risk for mouth cancer, a lot of these cases are missed or diagnosed late.
Usually, the patient is healthy, exercises and eats well. She doesn’t fit the old oral cancer profile.
Healthy or not?
Lydia Miner definitely didn’t fit the profile. She had a healthy diet, worked out and didn’t smoke or drink much. But she had a strange sensation in her throat that felt like a pill, stuck midway.
Or, she thought, it was skin irritated by one of the times she’d hurriedly choked down lunch during her hectic job. “I thought I was just imagining it,” says Lydia, now in her forties. But after two months, she knew better.
Like Mische, she got a scan, which showed something alarming. “The doctor stared at the results, then turned to me and said, ‘I think you have oral cancer,’” she recalls.
Her small malignant tumour, which was surgically removed, tested positive for HPV. Lydia was incredulous. She hadn’t thought about the virus in over a decade.
In her twenties, Lydia had had a series of abnormal Pap smears, but by her thirties, her results continuously came back normal and she’d forgotten about any irregularities.
But HPV is nothing if not sneaky; it can lie dormant and undetectable in the body for years, making it incredibly difficult to know if you’re infected and unknowingly passing it along to others.
This can also make it nearly impossible to pinpoint the partner responsible for giving it to you. (Meaning, that one-night stand you had in your teens or the guy you dated seriously in varsity can come back to haunt you well into your thirties and beyond).
Mische Eddins, 37, woke up with a head cold. Or what seemed like one. Post-nasal drip, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes. No big deal seeing as a bug was going around.
“I had just been bragging to my friends about how I’d managed to avoid getting sick,” she says. “But I was healthy, so it all passed quickly.” Everything, that is, except a swollen node on the left side of her neck, which, months later, hadn’t gone away.
The new year rolled round and the little bump was still there. Without an appointment, Mische walked into her doctor’s office and left with a script for antibiotics.
There was no improvement. She then went from doctor to doctor and finally, six months after that seemingly innocuous head cold, she had a PET/CT scan.
The results were shattering: Mische had stage-three cancer, which had spread from her tonsil to her lymph nodes.
Within hours, her doctors had scheduled a tonsillectomy and were talking about chemo and radiation. Someone suggested she prepare a will.
“I was floored,” she says. “A will?” A professional singer, Mische exercised almost every day, ate a mostly organic diet, didn’t drink heavily and had never smoked as an adult. Even her doctors were stymied.
Searching for answers, one doctor tested Mische’s cancer cells for the human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted infection notoriously linked to cervical cancer.
Quite a shock
Mische was a bit taken aback as she’d spent the past 16 years in two monogamous relationships and was fastidious about getting annual Pap smears, which had never been abnormal.
Why were they now testing her mouth? Her doctors explained the worrisome new link between oral cancer and HPV, which can be transmitted to the mouth through oral sex. And indeed, she tested positive. Her cancer was HPV-related.
Ten years ago, oral cancer among women was practically unheard of. Patients were nearly always male and over 50 years of age, heavy smokers or drinkers, or both.
(When actor Michael Douglas, 66, was diagnosed with the illness last year, the media pointed to his longtime half-a-pack-a-day habit.)
But according to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, there has been a major upswing in HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer, a deadly disease often found in the base of the tongue and the tonsils.
In fact, up to 20 per cent of all oral cancers are now HPV-related, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and about 25 per cent of cases occur in women, some as young as 19, says oncologist, Dr Gregory Masters.
But how could HPV be causing so many problems? It’s something doctors and health experts have long feared, thanks to the rampant spread of the virus.
You’ve probably heard the stats: one in 35 women in South Africa (SA) will develop cervical cancer, predominantly caused by HPV.
About 21 per cent of SA women are estimated to harbour a cervical HPV infection at any time. What’s more, the virus – which can have zero symptoms or bloom into visible warts – will affect up to 80 per cent of sexually active women.
In the majority of cases, the body’s immune system will clear up the HPV within two years (there is some debate over whether the same HPV infection can return to cause cervical lesions later, but research is in the early stages).
However, some infected SA women – around 6 000 per year – will not clear and may develop cervical cancer. This has prompted the WHO to recommend that girls be vaccinated for HPV by age 12.
To date, safe-sex campaigns have blamed the spread of HPV on unprotected vaginal sex. But it’s now clear that the disease can be contracted orally too.
And that’s where things got dangerous for Mische Eddins and thousands of others. Their mouths were infected with HPV-16, the strain that most doctors believe is responsible for the majority of HPV-related oral cancers.
How long HPV-16 lingers in the mouth before turning into cancer is uncertain. But what is evident is that more than 14 percent of cases aren’t caught until the very late stages, possibly because some doctors are slow to consider the cancer in young female patients.
Since HPV-related oral cancers don’t affect the traditional group of those at risk for mouth cancer, a lot of these cases are missed or diagnosed late.
Usually, the patient is healthy, exercises and eats well. She doesn’t fit the old oral cancer profile.
Healthy or not?
Lydia Miner definitely didn’t fit the profile. She had a healthy diet, worked out and didn’t smoke or drink much. But she had a strange sensation in her throat that felt like a pill, stuck midway.
Or, she thought, it was skin irritated by one of the times she’d hurriedly choked down lunch during her hectic job. “I thought I was just imagining it,” says Lydia, now in her forties. But after two months, she knew better.
Like Mische, she got a scan, which showed something alarming. “The doctor stared at the results, then turned to me and said, ‘I think you have oral cancer,’” she recalls.
Her small malignant tumour, which was surgically removed, tested positive for HPV. Lydia was incredulous. She hadn’t thought about the virus in over a decade.
In her twenties, Lydia had had a series of abnormal Pap smears, but by her thirties, her results continuously came back normal and she’d forgotten about any irregularities.
But HPV is nothing if not sneaky; it can lie dormant and undetectable in the body for years, making it incredibly difficult to know if you’re infected and unknowingly passing it along to others.
This can also make it nearly impossible to pinpoint the partner responsible for giving it to you. (Meaning, that one-night stand you had in your teens or the guy you dated seriously in varsity can come back to haunt you well into your thirties and beyond).
Grab a pair of 8 to 10-pound dumbbells and get in plank position with your hands on the weights and your feet hip-width apart. learn more
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