How did i get genital warts?

I have had three sex partners.  I had a pap smear after I had sex with the first two guys, and it came back negative.  Now I have been with this guy for awhile and we started having sex with out a condom so I wanted to get checked out, because I was noticing some bumps in the vagina region like a month after having unprotected sex.  The doctor thought they were skin tags at first then, the results came back that they were warts.  But the guy that I am with only had one sex partner and he said never got any bumps on his penis and now he does.  So he had them burned off with acid and I still haven't done anything about mine and we still have unprotected sex. So is he going to get them back?  And if he didn't have them before and neither did I, how did the warts come about?

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

All that can be said with certainty is that somewhere along the line, you had sex with someone who has an HPV infection with one of the types that causes genital warts, esp. type 6 or 11.  The negative pap smear after your first two partners means nothing; you still could have acquired HPV from one of them.

And there is no way to know whether your new partner got warts from you or you were infected by him.  Warts can show up anywhere from weeks to months (or years) after catching HPV, so the fact that he or you noticed warts first says nothing about who gave it to whom.

It is a useless game to try to figure out where HPV comes from.  Don't try, and don't worry about it.  Just follow through with whatever treatment your health care provider advises.

Good luck--  HHH, MD

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