How oral séx destroys your body

 percent will have visible symptoms. What all this means is that oral sex puts you at risk of picking up a cancer-causing virus, not just the host of venereal diseases such as HIV.

The most obvious HPV-related oral-cancer risk factors have to do with the kind of sex you have, how often you have it and the number of partners you’ve tangled sheets with. According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who have had six or more sex partners are more than twice as likely to develop oral cancer. But those who’ve had six or more oral sex partners increase their chances by a whopping 340 per cent. As such, says Masters, HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer should be considered a sexually communicable disease. “From cases I see, I get the sense that many younger people don’t think oral sex counts as sex,” he says. “But oral sex has risks too.”