If a thing does not have a clear connection to NET/CS, I usually do not write about it here. But I learned something about a different type of cancer last night at a Dana-Farber event that was so stunning and–from a number of standpoints–so important that I am willing to break my normal habits to talk about it.

Most of you know we have an HPV epidemic going on in this country. Many of you also know that virtually every case of cervical cancer is caused by the HPV virus. In 2008, the last year for which we have numbers, there were 12,410 cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in the US. That number represents a significant decline over the last generation or so, largely thanks to the use of the Pap smear that detects abnormal cells in the cervix before they have had a chance to become cancerous. Those abnormal cells are removed in a fairly simple procedure and the woman does not develop cervical cancer as a result. Of course the screening has to continue since the potential is always there for other cells to mutate as a result of HPV, but fewer and fewer cases of cervical cancer are detected every year. But over 4,000 women still die from cervical cancer each year.

In the past couple of years, we have developed a couple of different vaccines for the HPV virus. There has, despite the increasing number of cases of HPV, been considerable hue and cry over the morality of the vaccine–HPV is a sexually transmitted virus–and whether or not requiring girls to get the vaccine before they might become sexually active is a good idea. For reasons I don’t understand there has not been much said about vaccinating young boys at puberty one way or the other–which strikes me as strange since the last time I looked sex generally involves two people. Given our culture, I suppose the illusion that HPV was/is doing little or nothing to the male population may have had something to do with that.

But until last night, I had heard very little about cancers involving HPV outside the cervix.

One of the doctors I sat with last night specializes in head and neck cancer–and he told our group that particular cancer has reached epidemic proportions. The medical community expects 52,000 new cases of this cancer to be diagnosed this year. That number is doubling about every 5-10 years–so by 2022 we can expect over 100,000 cases a year.

And many of them are spawned by the HPV virus–80 percent of them in men in their 30s, 40s and 50s..

The good news is there is an 80-90 percent cure rate. The bad news is the cure leaves the victims so debilitated they cannot work at all for three to four months. And in a significant number of cases, the person’s salivary glands are destroyed, leaving them on a feeding tube for the rest of their lives. The

treatments also often destroy the person’s teeth in the process.

Curing just one patient costs about $100,000–and never mind the productivity and human costs involved.

Yet many cases of this disease are preventable if people would just get vaccinated before becoming sexually active.