"Concurrent with a change in sexual behavior," the researchers write, people are not getting their tonsils taken out. That has created a breeding ground for oral cancer. Indeed, Fakhry and colleagues report that 77 percent of tonsil cancers in Denmark between 2000 and 2010 were related to HPV. In today's study, the team evaluated more than three million Danish patients in a 35-year database and found that palatine tonsil removal was associated with a 60 to 85 percent decrease in tonsillar cancers.

Ultimately it seems obvious that if you get your tonsils taken out, and they are floating in a jar on your shelf, those tonsils cannot turn cancerous. So your risk of cancer will be that much lower. The question raised by the researchers, then, is if rates of oral cancers are increasing as HPV spreads, would this be a worthwhile procedure for everyone to have?

Before jumping into everyone's throats with a hot spoon, Anil Chaturvedi, an investigator at the Division of Cancer Epidemiology at the National Institutes of Health says in an accompanying editorial, as scientists are wont to say, that more studies are needed.

"Although a common surgical procedure, tonsillectomy is not without minor complications," Chaturvedi notes, "such as postoperative bleeding, pain, and nausea, as well as major complications, such as hemorrhage and death." (He cites an analysis of 5,968 adult tonsillectomy cases, in which the mortality rate was 0.03 percent.) They also cost money. The average cost associated of a tonsillectomy is $3,832 in total. And that's if there are no complications. If patients wind up in an emergency department because of undue postoperative bleeding, that averages $6,388. With pain, $4,708, and with dehydration, $5,753.

If people who are at high risk for tonsillar cancer could somehow be identified early on, Fakhry noted in a press statement—likening to situation to BRCA-positive women at risk for breast cancer, of which Angelina Jolie has become the face—then those people could potentially benefit from prophylactic tonsil removal.

Meanwhile, the importance of this study is in underscoring that there is a cost-effective and overall-effective way to dramatically lower everyone's risk of oral cancer without reviving of the dental dam: the HPV vaccine, which is widely available and poses no risk of destroying the individual. An ounce of prevention is worth a clump of tonsillar carcinoma, and yet most young Americans aren't getting vaccinated.