Yeah, yeah. It's kind of funny to say "anal," but this is a real health issue for gay men. At my gym a few months ago I ran into an acquaintance I hadn't seen in months. He looked terrible. I asked him where he'd been, and he told me he had cancer, anal cancer, and had been in chemotherapy.

That was the first time I had heard of anal cancer, but since then it keeps cropping up in the news. Gardisil, the vaccine that protects women from cervical cancer, may also protect gay men from anal cancer. Pink News is reporting both on a new test to diagnose anal cancer and on new gay-focused Gardisil studies:

A new test that will detect the early signs of a cancer that is prevalent among gay men has been devised. The incidence of anal cancer is estimated as 37 per 100,000 in gay men. For gay men who are HIV-positive, the incidence is about twice as great – around 75 per 100,000.

"For gay and bisexual men who are at risk of anal cancer, these tests are an important medical breakthrough. They will help save lives. With this reliable screening test, signs of anal cancer will be detected earlier, leading to speedier, more effective treatment."

The research, carried out at the MRC Cancer Cell Unit in Cambridge, explores using minichromosome maintenance proteins (MCMs) to detect pre-cancerous and cancerous cells in the anus.

. . . "Two decades ago, I deduced that if the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer in women, it must also have the potential to cause anal cancer in people who have anal sex, especially gay and bisexual men."

Continued after the jump.

"I lobbied the UK government for two decades to take action but was constantly rebuffed. The British Medical Journal and The Lancet declined to report the issue and Cancer Research UK dismissed it.

"We must also continue to raise awareness of the disease, particularly among people in high risk groups such as gay and bisexual men so they can take action if they have symptoms."

Last year PinkNews.co.uk reported that private clinics in London have been injecting gay men with a vaccine designed to reduce the risk of cervical cancer. The Gardsil vaccine provides protection from human papillomavirus (HPV) which causes the cancer as well as anal warts and cancer of the penis and anus.

The BBC reports that clinics in London have been charging gay men £450 for a three-dose course of Gardsil.

Roger Pebody, treatments manager at sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust, said it was unclear if the vaccine would be appropriate for adult gay males. "It may be of use but we need to see some research first - so far the research has been on women," he told PinkNews.co.uk. "There is a study going in America now which includes gay men."

It is likely that many sexually active gay men will already have PVT, so a vaccination would not prevent them contracting it.

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Apparently, we take our bathroom habits for granted when we really shouldn't because, like James Kotecki's political satire, American toilet hygiene is not something to be especially proud of. But no one is talking about how using toilet paper is not the best way to get clean "down there."

The world divides into water cultures and paper cultures. This comes into quite stark relief in Japan because Japan used to be a paper culture. Two hundred years ago they used sticks or stones or paper. And now, because Japan has had a toilet revolution, they've turned into a water culture, and they have very high-tech toilets with in-built bidets and drying systems that can massage you and probably sing to you.

But the U.S. and the U.K. stubbornly remain paper cultures, and attempts to introduce bidet toilets have failed. Hygienically, bidet toilets are infinitely superior. Using toilet paper to clean yourself down there makes about as much hygienic sense as cleaning yourself with a towel and imagining you're rubbing off the dirt. We've got a very unhygienic way of cleaning a place of our body that we would like to be very clean.

Overall, better bathroom hygiene "has added 20 years to the modern lifespan, so this thing that we won't even discuss is actually responsible for perhaps decades of all of our lives." But, like lots of things, we could be doing it better.

Head over to Salon to read the full article.