HPV is Not in Scarlet Letters: Cervical Cancer Patients Being Stigmatized By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Imagine being given a diagnosis of cervical cancer. That’s bad enough. Now, imagine that it comes with the assumption you got it by sleeping around. In 1983 and 1984, Dr. Harold zur Hausen isolated Human Papillomavirus (HPV). There are more than 200 types of human papillomavirus (HPV), most of which are common and symptom-free.1 But several variants, HPV-16 and HPV-18 being the first two identified, are associated with cervical cancer. HPV-16 is in 50 percent of cancers and HPV-18 in [...]