Diagnosing HPV
If you’re worried about contracting HPV, here’s the good news: Over 99% of the time, if you have HPV, you’ll either know it on sight, or, if you don’t, then the infection really isn’t serious, and will pass before long.
But here’s the bad news: The strains of HPV which can lead to cancer do not show any visible symptoms.
According to the American Cancer Society, around eleven thousand women will develop cervical cancer this year, with just under four thousand of these cases ending in death. Cancer causing strains of HPV are to blame for a significant portion of these cases, perhaps as much as 70% or higher.
There are around two hundred or two hundred and fifty different strains of HPV, and luckily, only a small number of these (around fifteen) are considered high risk or can possibly lead to cervical cancer, including HPVs 31, 16, 45, and 18. Because these types do not actually show any visible HPV symptoms, it is absolutely imperative that all women have regular cancer screenings conducted. Luckily, the National Cervical Cancer Coalition estimates that around 89% of women do go in for regular screenings. If you fall into the 11% that do not, get off your butt, and call your doctor. This is too important to put off until you get around to it.
And, of course, even though visible genital warts do not lead to cancer, they don’t mean that you don’t have a more dangerous strain of HPV. Multiple HPV types can exist within the same person’s body, so regular tests need to be conducted, no matter what.
SELF DIAGNOSIS OF VISIBLE STRAINS OF HPV
Luckily, we know what warts look like. It’s easy to spot a hand wart or a genital wart, most of the time. If you can see a wart, don’t worry. Even genital warts, as unsightly as they may be, almost never lead to any form of cancer.
Not all visible warts look exactly like, you know, warts, though, or at least not in the way we all know what warts look like. A number of strains can cause warts that don’t exactly stick out like a sore thumb.
Because they start small and eventually grow, it’s important to pay attention to your body. It’s weird, you use your hands for everything all day, but how often do you actually stop and look at your hands? Or your elbows for that matter, or even the bottom of your feet, or your genitals? You don’t need to sit down and inspect yourself for an hour every day, just take a look at your whole body the next time you shower. It’s said that nearly every person contracts some form of HPV at one point or another before they die, so it’s not entirely impossible that you might be developing plantar warts and not even know it.
It’d take too much space to list every possible type of wart, so just be on the look out for any out of the ordinary blemishes that can’t be chalked up to acne, moles, or minor bruises, etcetera.
If you catch a wart early, you can treat it right away. Most wart infections don’t actually need any professional medical attention. You can get an over the counter wart remover at nearly any drug store in the world. If you take a lot of vitamins and eat well to strengthen your immune system, you might even stop a wart in its tracks and prevent it from becoming any bigger.
When a wart infection becomes persistent, if it keeps recurring after treatment or it just won’t go away, that’s when it’s time to talk to a doctor and see what can be done. Fortunately, the actual diagnosing of warts is easy to do yourself, and, most of the time, so is treatment.