When "Safe Sex" Isn't

Too many young people think that oral sex is safe.  As Doctor Bernadine Healey points out in Clueless on STDs, Throat Cancer and Oral Sex.

People seem clueless that sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and human papillomavirus can take hold in parts of the oral cavity during sex with infected partners and that the oral contact can infect the genitals, too. HPV is a particularly scurrilous threat, since it incubates silently in the back of the mouth and is now linked to a dangerous form of throat cancer in both men and women similar to the one that arises in the cervix.

There's been an unexpected increase in oropharyngeal cancer, a cancer that develops at the base of the tongue,  among young people. 

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this rise in oropharyngeal cancer is linked to changing sexual practices and, in particular, ones that involve bathing the throat with HPV-infected fluid. Increasingly, scientists are implicating HPV-16, and in some cases 18, the same ones that causes cervical cancer.

However good college kids are on using condoms for vaginal sex, very few use them for oral sex.