Q: Just wondering if you can pass HPV from a female to another female. My girlfriend went in for her pap when we first got together and she came back clean but she went back a couple of weeks ago and they put her on some medicine for HPV. Since she has not cheated on me with any guys I was wondering how it could just show up now. And no, I have never had a pap, I know I need to but I just haven’t yet.
A: HPV can be effectively passed through any genital-to-genital contact, or sometimes through oral-genital contact. So, yes, it can easily pass between females.
A couple other things to think about:
1. HPV is sneaky. It’s possible to have it for years, lying dormant, and have it flare up later. The pap doesn’t test for the presence of HPV directly, but rather for abnormal cells present on the cervix. It’s entirely possible that she had an HPV infection at the time of her earlier pap, but it just hadn’t yet affected her cervix.
2. HPV found on the cervix (where a pap smear would find it) isn’t generally treated by medicine. Did they specifically say that she’d tested positive for HPV, or just that she should take some medicine for it? I wonder if what she’s getting is actually Gardasil–which is an HPV vaccine rather than a treatment and would administered before someone actually caught the virus. If that’s what it was, it’d be a series of three shots spaced out over several months. You may want to follow up and find out what she is being treated with and for.
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