Causes

Like warts that appear on other areas of your skin, genital warts are caused by a virus — HPV — that infects the top layers of your skin. There are more than 100 different types of HPV, but only a few can cause genital warts.

You get HPV from having sex with an infected partner. Some people use condoms and still get the virus, so condoms are not entirely reliable when it comes to HPV. HPV is really, really common, because most people never show symptoms and no one knows they have it. Experts think that only about 1-2% of the people with wart-causing HPV and 3-5% of the people with dysplasia-causing HPV ever get diagnosed.

In the case of HPV, the infection is actually localized directly to the infected point in the skin, as opposed to the herpes simplex virus. Unlike HPV, the herpes virus goes through the skin and into the nerve cells, traveling up the nerve cell connection to the nerve ganglia by the spinal cord, where the virus lives. With HPV, the infection is actually in the skin.

HPV is contagious and transmitted through contact by an infected piece of skin with a non-infected piece of skin. The presumption is that the non-infected area has to have a small, perhaps microscopic, break that allows a tiny amount of tissue from the infected HPV area to get into the non-infected area, allowing an infection to set up.

Therefore, if a person with a wart anywhere on that person’s body were to place that area in contact with the genitalia of the other person, this could cause the virus to be transmitted to the genital area of the partner.

These strains of the virus are highly contagious and spread through sexual contact with an infected person. About two-thirds of people who have sexual contact with someone who has genital warts develop the condition — usually within three months of contact, but in some cases not for years.

Risk factors