<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Yesterday, 68-year-old actor Michael Douglas, speaking on returning from the brink of death from Stage 4 throat cancer, told The Guardian quite frankly that his disease was caused by HPV from giving oral sex: &amp;quot;This particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus. But yeah, it&amp;#039;s a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer. And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it.&amp;quot; Naturally, the World Wide Webzors exploded with rebuttals to Douglas&amp;#039;s claim, all sorts of hilarious, incredulous, and pissed. Some people argued that Douglas&amp;#039;s confessed former vices, including cigarettes and booze, probably had more to do with his cancer diagnosis than anything that happened in he and Catherine Zeta-Jones&amp;#039; marital bed (which I now picture as a high thread-count version of the shell from The Birth of Venus because HASHTAG VAGINA IMAGERY). Other people just made the LOLs about it. (CZJ herself, meanwhile, cringes over her morning coffee.)  Someone&amp;#039;s mom makes a Michael Douglas-related &amp;quot;As if men didn&amp;#039;t have enough excuses!&amp;quot; joke, sends their adult child screaming from the room. \u2014 Mara Wilson (@MaraWritesStuff) June 3, 2013  &amp;quot;Girl you look so fine tonight, I could catch cancer from you for hours.&amp;quot; --Michael Douglas pick up line, &amp;#039;93 \u2014 Gladstone (@WGladstone) June 3, 2013  The worst thing about how Michael Douglas got HPV is that he calls it &amp;quot;romancing the scone.&amp;quot; \u2014 Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) June 3, 2013 And the ne plus ultra of Douglas-related tweets from yesterday:  If Michael Douglas were onto ANYTHING, Warren Beatty would&amp;#039;ve be telling Annette what to pick up at Whole Foods thru a trach tube years ago. \u2014 Julie Klausner (@julieklausner) June 2, 2013 While certainly ripe for jokes and ridicule, medical experts this morning report that Douglas actually isn&amp;#039;t off-base. In 2011, the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that there had been a spike of cancer rates in men who had contracted HPV from oral sex. According to NBC News&amp;#039; Vitals blog, the CDC also reports that 63 percent of the 11,700 cases of throat cancer reported in America were caused by HPV, as well as anal, head and neck-related cancers. Sufferers from all of these illnesses who also tested positive for HPV shot up a crazy 225 percent from 1988 to 2014, which we could attribute to more than just the Contagion-esque spread of the super-common human papillomavirus. It could also have to do with the reticence to discuss STDs in general. However, Douglas&amp;#039;s quote closely links cunnilingus with cancer without stressing the fact that HPV \u2014 not just having oral sex with women = cancer \u2014 is easily prevented with a vaccine like Guardasil. Furthermore, there are tons of ways to pick up HPV other than going downtown on a woman: It can be contracted via oral sex with an infected man on the receiving end, hands, &amp;quot;shared objects&amp;quot; that are infected, and even prenatally. It&amp;#039;s often said that the majority of men and women have HPV. Matt Cook, the executive director of Sex Research Labs, said that one of his studies showed that men who have never had oral sex had a higher-than-average chance of getting oral cancer, and under 20 percent of men in Douglas&amp;#039;s age range report giving oral sex in the first place. But thanks to this oversimplification, you can bet that it&amp;#039;ll be harder to get certain super-nervous dudes to go down on you for awhile, even if you&amp;#039;re totally safe. Summer &amp;#039;13 just got significantly lamer. Follow Anna on Twitter. Image via PacificCoastNews.com "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a13091/michael-douglas-throat-cancer-hpv/>