What are the symptoms of HPV?
If there are one or more painless lesions around your vagina, penis, or anus (sometimes, they may have a cauliflower-like appearance),
If there is itching or bleeding on your sexual organ or anus,
If there is a change in your normal urine stream (for example, urinating sideways),
If you have a sex partner with genital warts, even when you do not show any symptoms,
you may have been infected by HPV.
If you have one or more of these, you need to consult a sexual health clinic.
You can wipe out your warts with proper treatment and get help to get rid of HPV infection.
What is HPV?
HPV is the abbreviation for a virus family called Human Papillomavirus. There are more than 170 types of HPV identified so far. Around 40 of them cause diseases in human beings when sexually transmitted.
Most HPV infections do not show any symptoms and disappear from the body in around two years. However, sometimes genital warts occur due to HPV infection and these warts need treatment, and sometimes lesions may occur, which may turn into cancer later.
How is HPV transmitted?
HPV is mostly transmitted due to close skin-to-skin touching. As it is often seen in genital areas, it is also accepted as a sexually transmitted disease.
There are very limited publications on that a person may rarely be infected with HPV due to indirect contact in places such as around the pools or showers used by many people. It is generally known that HPV is a tenuous virus and cannot survive for long outside the body.