Genital warts and HPV

Human papillomavirus is so common that meeting it is very nearly a condition of being sexually active. Most infections are cleared by the immune system within a couple of years and never cause a thing. The interest, and the danger, lies in the small print: some low-risk types cause genital warts, and a handful of high-risk types cause cancer.

The warts, and the darker end

Warts are the visible, harmless end. The Romans knew them and called them figs, which has not improved anyone's appetite since. They do not turn into cancer, and they can be treated with creams or clinic procedures, though many people simply want them gone for peace of mind.

The high-risk types are a different and more sombre story. HPV causes virtually all cervical cancer, 99.8 percent of cases, and still kills around 880 women a year in the UK, alongside a rising toll of anal, penile, and throat cancers. The rise in HPV-related throat cancer in men is real and often surprises people; a well-known actor drew headlines some years ago by publicly linking his own throat cancer to HPV. The single most poignant chapter belongs to Henrietta Lacks, a black American woman whose cervical cancer cells, driven by HPV type 18, were taken without her consent in 1951. Those HeLa cells, taken as she was dying, became the most important cell line in medical history and helped prove how HPV causes cancer and build the vaccine against it. It is a story of a real harm done to one woman and an extraordinary good that came from it, and it deserves to be told honestly as both.

The win

Here is the genuinely uplifting part, and there are not many in this field. The HPV vaccine works spectacularly. In 2024 Scotland reported that among women fully vaccinated at age 12 or 13, it had detected no cases of invasive cervical cancer at all. Not few. None. It is offered free to young people on the NHS schedule and privately to those outside it, and it is one of the closest things modern medicine has to a cancer-prevention switch.

Where we fit, and where the NHS does

HPV testing on its own is available with us where a doctor judges it useful. We do not offer cervical screening, the smear test; the NHS provides that free through the national screening programme, and that is the right place for it. Smears plus vaccination are why cervical cancer is now, for the first time in history, a disease we can talk about eliminating.

The honest summary

HPV is nearly universal and usually harmless, warts are a nuisance not a menace, and a few types cause real cancers that kill. The vaccine and NHS cervical screening between them turn one of the deadlier viruses into one of the most preventable. Knowing which HPV is which is most of the calm.