Jason Mendelsohn had been married for close to 20 years and was
happily raising three kids when he noticed the painless lump on his neck
while shaving three years ago.
Within days, he had been diagnosed with a
deadly form of cancer caused by a virus that he probably caught while in
college, decades before.
Mendelsohn, now 48, is the classic victim of
head and neck cancer caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. A new
study out this week shows there’s a silent epidemic of HPV-related
cancers among men.
A team at the University of Florida, Baylor
College of Medicine and elsewhere found that 11.5 percent of U.S. men
were actively infected with oral HPV between 2011 and 2014, and 3
percent of women were. That adds up to 11 million men and 3 million
women, the researchers report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
It’s a sexually transmitted infection and the
more sex partners someone had, the bigger their risk. But the study
found smoking also increased the danger of a high-risk infection, and,
perhaps surprising to some, that men and women alike who smoked
marijuana were far more likely to develop a cancer-causing strain of
HPV.
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