The Oral Cancer Foundation is a national public service, IRS-registered 501(c)3 head and neck cancer charity designed to reduce suffering and save lives through prevention, education, research funding, advocacy, and patient support activities. Oral and oropharyngeal cancers are the largest group of those cancers that fall into the head and neck cancer category. Common names for it include such things as mouth cancer, tongue cancer, tonsil cancer, and throat cancer. Approximately 58,500 people in the US will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer in 2024. This includes those cancers that occur in the mouth itself (salivary gland cancers, tongue cancers, mucosal soft tissue cancers), in the very back of the mouth known as the oropharynx (primarily tonsil and tonsillar crypt and base of tongue), and on the exterior lips of the mouth. For more than a decade, there has been an annual increase in the rate of occurrence of oral and oropharyngeal cancers. This is expected to continue as there is no national screening policy or protocol, and the disease’s risk factors remain relatively unchanged.

There are two distinct pathways by which most people come to oral and oropharyngeal cancer. One is through the use of tobacco and alcohol, a long-term historic problem and cause, and the other is through exposure to the HPV-16 virus (human papillomavirus version 16), a relatively newly (since 1999) identified etiology, and the same one is responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers in women. A small percentage of people (under about 10%) do get oral cancers from no currently identified cause. It is believed that these are likely related to genetic predisposition, frailty, or an unidentified shared risk factor.

While some think this is a rare cancer, mouth cancers will be newly diagnosed in about 145 new individuals each day in the US alone, and a person dies from oral cancer every hour of every day. If you add the head and neck subcategory of laryngeal throat cancers, the rates of occurrence (about 12,000 additional new cases per year) and death are significantly higher. When found at early stages of development, oral cancers can have an 80 to 90 % survival rate. Unfor