(no subject)

[taerowyn]

And then....the oral sex! Then again, maybe not.


And, unlike the oral sex/breast cancer thing that circulates every few months, this is, unfortunately, real science.

Comments

[underwhelm.livejournal.com]

I hate HPV. The information available about it reflects the sort of namby-pamby inconcusiveness of the science available about it. Do our immune systems control it or not? Do I have it? It's impossible to know until I exhibit symptoms, and even if I never exhibit symptoms I could still have it. Thanks a lot!

Thankfully, I've already resigned myself to dying from cancer (and I don't drink or smoke, just use a lot of electronics), so this is kind of a non-issue. It's certainly not going to end my oral sexlife.

[taerowyn.livejournal.com]

HPV is admittedly pretty tricky. I mean they've basically said that unless both you and your partner are lifetime-monogamous you're almost guaranteed to get it. And then, even having it, it could either have absolutely no effect on you or could kill you (by making you susceptible to cancer or other ways) or anywhere in between and there's nothing you can do.

It's not so much "namby-pamby inconclusiveness of the science" as it is the fact that it's just one of those diseases that isn't a straightforward case of transmission, symptom, diagnosis, cure.

[underwhelm.livejournal.com]

Well, the causal chain is just as evident in cases of HPV as it is in any other disease: you're exposed to it and it inhabits your body. The problem is that it is apparently prohibitively expensive to test for it except when someone exhibits symptoms like warts or cancer. Plus, the strains that make you susceptible to cancer are the ones that don't cause warts. And the only (speculative) "cure" so far is immunal.

So hooray. Women should be getting annual pap smears anyway to control for the cervical cancer. Now maybe we should all go in once a year to check for abnormal cells on the mouth...

It goes both ways

[shelbinator.livejournal.com]

'cause the evil mouth -- or at least, the mouths of the 80%-ish of us who have had HSV-1 related cold sores nasty up the corner of our lips -- is now generating a significant minority of the cases of genital herpes! Ack!

Sex is like scary and stuff. I'm going to stick with my intensive yoga program till I can fold in half.

[ihvpave.livejournal.com]

Herpes has a lot of the same characteristics:
1) you can't test 'til you have an outbreak
2) you can be a carrier and never have an outbreak - and still put people at risk (!)
3) facts are inconclusive about big chunks of transmission data.

Had an interesting talk with this doctor I know about it recently, and she had several cases, in different locations, with herpes outbreaks in which there was no sexual history for the victim. At all. Fully grown adults, in their 50s and stuff (nuns, all, interestingly - and yes, from different convent-things) - raging primary cases.

BTW - I added you a while back after the Boston meetup but forgot to tell you.