A: The short answer is that it is very unlikely you would experience another outbreak of warts, or infect a partner, fifteen years after your symptoms disappeared.

To explain a bit more fully: Scientists have detected more than 100 different strains of HPV. Approximately 30 types can affect the skin in the genital area, producing cell changes that sometimes lead to warts or pre-cancerous lesions. Your outbreak was caused by one of these strains. At some point after your symptoms were treated, your immune system kicked in and successfully suppressed the virus so that your symptoms did not recur. By that time, you were already significantly less likely to be contagious to a partner than while you were symptomatic; after fifteen years with no symptoms, passing on the virus is even less likely. Experts are not 100% certain whether the body is actually able to completely eradicate the virus, or whether you do in fact carry your strain forever. Practically speaking, though, this doesn’t matter much, because the effect is the same: you remain symptom free, and highly unlikely to infect a partner.

In terms of your immunity or susceptibility to HPV in the future, you can consider yourself “immune” to the strain with which you were initially infected. However, it is still possible for you to contract a different strain. (In fact, you have probably been exposed to other strains already, simply because HPV infection of some type is VERY common.) Much of the time, your immune system will fight off the HPV strain so that you never see symptoms. Taking all these factors into consideration, it is technically possible, but not very probable, that you could contract a different strain of HPV and experience symptoms again.

Hopefully, this information will help you make an informed decision about whether or not to tell partners about your history with HPV. The following web resource has a great breakdown of how an HPV infection progresses and resolves (don’t be deterred by the fact that the source is the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology; the general information on HPV applies to both men and women).

Happy New Year!

-SFSI Staff