I recently listened to Paul Ewald talk about how a lot of cancer is due to infection on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge. That wasn’t too surprising, Ewald has been making the case for a connection between infection and lots of diseases for a while. What jumped out at me is his claim that kissing can spread some of the viruses. Here’s something he told Discover a few years back:
D: How do we get infected with these dangerous pathogens?
PE: Two of the most powerful examples are sexual transmission and kissing transmission, and by that I mean juicy kissing, not just a peck on the cheek. If you think about these modes of transmission, in which it might be a decade before a person has another partner, you realize that rapidly replicating is not very valuable—the winning strategy for the microbe would be to keep a low profile, requiring persistent infections for years. So we would expect that disproportionately, the sexually transmitted pathogens would be involved in causing cancer, or chronic diseases in general. You can test this. Just look at the pathogens that are accepted as causing cancer—Epstein-Barr virus, Kaposi’s sarcoma–associated herpesvirus, human T lymphotropic virus 1—and find out whether they’re transmitted this way. They almost all are. A random sample would yield maybe 15 to 20 percent of pathogens associated with cancer being sexually transmitted, yet the figure is almost 100 percent. When you look at viruses alone, it is 100 percent.
If a lot of kissing and number of sexual partners is predictive of risk of cancer, my immediate thought is that this naturally explains a lot of the cancer that runs in families. Families can pass on genes and cultural norms which would favor or disfavor certain behaviors.
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