Ironically, April is both Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Awareness month as well as Oral, Head and Neck Cancer Awareness month. Many people don’t even realize how these two diseases are linked and how they both pose a serious health risk, especially for our adolescent boys.
As far as STDs, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though only a quarter of the sexually active population is made up of people age 15 to 24, this group comprises almost half of the newly diagnosed 19 million STD cases each year.
A recent study looked at sexual activity in the high school population. Published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, this study found that for high school students, oral sex was most commonly their first sexual experience when they were beginning experimentation with sexual activity. It was twice as likely to precede vaginal intercourse than the other way around. Teens who engaged in oral sex by 9th grade were more likely to eventually have had vaginal intercourse by the end of 11th grade. In fact, often experimentation with oral sex led to riskier sexual activity within six months. The reverse was also found to be true: teens that delayed having oral sex were less likely to engage in vaginal intercourse during high school.
There was also this disturbing notion that many teens think of oral sex as a low-risk sexual activity. They look at it as a way to have sex without the risk of getting pregnant. However, more importantly, they have a misguided notion that it has less of a risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. However this is not true, almost all STDs can be contracted from oral sex too. And while contracting a bacterial STD such as gonorrhea from oral sex can have more immediate short-term effects and symptoms such as an inflamed throat infection called gonorrheal pharyngitis, a viral STD such as human papillomavirus (HPV) can have insidious, serious long-term health consequences later in life.
While many teens are aware of the dangers of STDs such as chlamydia and gonorrhea, HPV is another story. Some think it only concerns girls. More recently there has been a push to educate and vaccinate girls to prevent cervical cancer, but not much is being said about the potential problem it poses for adolescent boys.
HPV, according to the CDC, is a very common sexually transmitted disease infecting about 6 million people a year. It’s estimated that 50 percent of sexually active men and women have been exposed at some point in their lives. In the majority of infections, our body’s immune system takes care of it without any treatment. However, the same way certain strains of the virus get into cells of the cervix and change them into cancerous cells, it can also happen with the cells in the mouth and throat when exposed during oral sex.
Leigh Vinocur, M.D.: HPV From Oral Sex? Young People Often Underestimate The Risk
