The presence of human papillomavirus (HPV) was successfully analyzed by both general and type-specific HPV PCR in 103 samples from 115 patients diagnosed with oral and oropharyngeal cancer in Greece during the years 1986-2007. RESULTS: In total 13/103 (13%) tumours were HPV-positive and the majority of these were HPV-16-positive. Of the tonsillar cancer samples, 12/28 (43%) were HPV-positive and, notably, 1/6 (17%) collected between 1992-1998 and 11/22 (50%) collected between 2000-2007 were HPV-positive. Of the tongue cancer samples, 1/38 (3%) were HPV-positive, while none of the 41 oral cavity cancer samples was HPV-positive. CONCLUSION: Almost half of all the Greek tonsillar cancer patients had HPV in their tumours, with HPV-16 as the dominant type, and a tendency towards an increase in the proportion of HPV tumours was observed when comparing the percentage of HPV-positive tumours collected between 1992-1998 with those collected between 2000-2007.