British Dental Foundation Call For an End to Mouth Cancer Virus
The British Dental Health Foundation has called for males to be included in a vaccination programme aimed at fighting and eliminating the oral virus HPV, which is said to cause mouth cancer.
Mouth cancers have doubled of late and the HPV virus, which is transmitted through oral sex, is thought to be the main cause of this increase in mouth cancer cases.
The call by the government to act on these results by the BDHF comes after a study of over 46,000 mouth cancer patients in the US, the number of deaths caused by the HPV disease is now at an all time high.
The Department of Health have already agreed to issue the HPV vaccine to all 12-13 year olds in Britain, the government must now decide whether to issue the same vaccine to all males in an attempt to reduce the number of mouth cancer sufferers.
Chief Executive of the Dental Foundation, Dr Nigel Carter, said: “By expanding its HPV vaccination programme to include boys as well as girls, the government would be able to address the problem of rising HPV-related mouth cancer deaths in a simple, fair and effective manner.
“With young people becoming progressively more sexually active this problem is not going to go away.”
The problem is constantly rising and mouth cancer is now killing more men than women in the UK, one suffered dies every five hours as a result of the deadly disease.
Join this Discussion
