[Question #8734] HPV
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40 months ago
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In 2003 my bf in college told me he had a wart removed from his penis, it wasn’t biopsied but the doctor told him it looked like HPV/GW. 8 months later I had a small, lless than eraser sized bump on my outer labia of my vagina, very close to groin/bathing suit line. I went in told my Gyno that my boyfriend had GW and i thought i did to, she glanced at it, says that is what it looks like and it is common. My bf had never had another one, they gave me aldara, one application, I used a tiny amount 2 times from the one application and it was gone. I never had another one, it was never biopsied, and never had an abnormal pap smear. I told my next boyfriend 3 years later in 2007, and again I never had another one while we were together. we broke up in 2010
I reconciled with my soon to be husband in 2011, I did not tell him about the HPV from 2004, in my mind I had cleared it, or it was never GW to begin with and i didn’t want him to think he has something We don’t actually have. Again, pelvic exams, 2 pregnancies, and numerous pap smears that were normal, and no GW that i ever saw on him on me. We are in the process of a divorce and he has called everyone and told them he did the horrible things he did because he was told I had GW and he was trapped, and has launched a smear campaign where basically any partner I have ever had sex with says I gave them GW.
My question is with 2 tiny dabs of aldara, and it completely gone, was it a GW(it wasn’t rough, the location was outer labia, and i get skin tags and when i was younger had warts on my knee and arm that took several cyrotherapies to remove them, and they came back. I know i have been exposed to HPV, but are people considered more “contagious” in that 6-8 month window from being exposed to actually having symptoms, or are you more contagious after having the 1?
I would think if your immune system can keep you from getting them, it wouldn’t be able to cause them in someone else, and like the cold or the flu, we are contagiou
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H. Hunter Handsfield, MD
40 months ago
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Welcome to the forum. Thank you for your confidence in our services.
Wow -- I'm so sorry to hear of the inappropriate comments and accusations you are experiencing in an obviously contentious divorce. How unpleasant for you. But your husband is dead wrong in using HPV as some sort of marker of your sexual lifestyle, or any "horrible" health outcome on account of HPV. What a dork! Almost everyone gets genital HPV along the course of normal sexual relationships and lifestyle, and the frequency of HPV -- or the chance of long term carriage of active, transmissible infection -- are no higher in people with average sex lives (with a handful of partner) than in those with hundreds of partners. Most of us become infected with one or more HPV types within our first few sexual partnerships.
You needn't worry about your past genital wart. Resolution of HPV infections does not depend at all on treatment: whether or not use had had Aldara, genital warts and other HPV infections are suppressed by the immune system, and with no recurrent warts in nearly 20 years, you can be very confident you no longer have an active HPV infection that can be transmitted to sex partners. That said, HPV DNA can persist for life -- but such long delayed recurrence of active infection is rare. This also applies to other HPV infections you may have had. As you may know, almost all sexually active persons acquire genital area HPV, often with several HPV types.
Having said all that, I would suggest you not use my comments here in any formal manner in any legal response in your divorce proceedings. We are not authorized to give legal advice -- these comments are for your edification. Of course feel free to discuss them personally with your husband, if appropriate, but if HPV becomes an issue in reaching any sort of legal settlement, you should follow your attorney's advice about perhaps seeking an in person evaluation by an HPV expert.
I hope these comments are helpful. Let me know if anything isn't clear. Good luck in all this unpleasantness.
HHH, MD
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40 months ago
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Thank you! No i will not use this, and yes i was aware that I had probably been exposed, he has had previous sexual partners, and I did too. But like i said the previous boyfriends sort of felt “trapped” that they had to stay with me because they thought they had something that the second one never even had symptoms of. So I didn’t discuss it with my husband before we were married, I just assumed it was cleared and nothing to worry about any longer. I also didn’t want him to feel “trapped” or be called “gross” like i had before by being honest
No, I was never certain that was a genital wart with the location and the fact that it went away so quickly and without a full application of aldara. Most people act like warts are a little harder to remove.
1)Does the HPV from that particular wart stay localized?
2) have they ever studied when they felt people were more “contagious” before the wart or after the wart?
It certainly seems this is the most confusing STD but also the most common.
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H. Hunter Handsfield, MD
40 months ago
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Your previous partners' feeling of being "trapped" was nonsense. Nobody is "trapped" in a relationship because of a partner with HPV. Your partners were no more likely to be exposed to HPV or infected with it because they had sex with you than with any other partners they might have chosen. You were in the minority who were actually diagnosed with HPV -- but every other partner they might have had was equally likely to be infected as you were.
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I should have acknowledged that your wart diagnosis wasn't certain. But it seems likely. At this point, you can never know and I don't see that it matters (and never should have). HPV should be viewed as a normal, expected consequence of being sexually active; it's not much different than having staph or strep bacteria on skin, E. coli in our intestines, etc. It is entirely normal to have and be carrying HPV.
1) No, probably not. Think of the wart as the tip of an iceberg, with a much broader area of normal appearing genital tissues also being infected.
2) I am unaware of any studies of patients' beliefs that they were more contagious than other people might be. If such a survey were done, I probably would not trust the results. When and from whom any particular HPV infection was acquired rarely can be known with certainty, and any particular infected person's beliefs about the source and timing probably are wrong more than half the time.
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