All specimens that were included in this study were confirmed by surgical staging, histopathological re-review, and specimen adequacy assessment (beta-globin detection) to rule out the possibility of HPV negativity being due to misclassification of the tumour and/or specimen inadequacy.13,21 While a few of the HPV types detected with deep sequencing (HPV 32, 34 and 38) were not tested for with the PCR detection method used, most of the samples (164/169) revealed HPV types, that should have been detected with the PCR based method. Here, HBB is linked to neoplasm.