Over one-fifth of U.S. adults are infected with cancer-causing virus, federal report says

More than 20 percent of U.S. grown-ups are infected with a cancer-causing virus, a federal agency has reported.

A story by Jia Naqvi in The Washington Post today says that a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed almost 23 percent of American adults between the ages of 18 and 59 had one particular type “of genital human papilloma virus (HPV) that put them at high risk of certain cancers.”

The percentage almost doubled — to 42 percent — “if any type of genital HPV was included.”

Prevalence, the study of 2013 and 2014 showed, “was higher in men than in women, and it was sharply higher among blacks compared to other racial and ethnic groups.”

Geraldine McQuillan

Geraldine McQuillan, lead author of the report and a senior infectious disease epidemiologist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, is quoted as saying, “People really need to realize that this is a serious concern.”

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, the story states, with nearly 80 million people currently infected and about 14 million new infections occurring “annually among teenagers as well as adults.”

Each year, the Post article adds, “31,000 men and women are diagnosed with cancers caused by HPV — which, in most cases, would have been preventable with the HPV vaccine, according to the CDC.”

Studies of cancer-causing agents are detailed in “Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer,” a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.