Have you recently heard of genital warts? Wondering what genital warts is? Genital warts is the most common sexually transmitted disease today. This is a highly contagious virus that is transmitted from person to person during sexual contact. This disease is an equal opportunity variety that will affect either gender, any race, any social status, and any sexual orientation.

Understanding Genital Warts

If you feel like you are the only person in the world asking, “What is genital warts?” you can rest assured that you are not. There are people being diagnosed with this disease all over the world. More than one million cases are purported to be diagnosed each year with an estimate of 5.5 million cases actually being transmitted. This is an astounding number of people who are being infected and then living with genital warts, many of them not even realizing it.

Genital warts is caused by the human papilloma virus, also known as HPV. There are many, many different strains of the disease while only a handful of them cause genital warts. Genital warts is quite contagious and when you have skin to skin contact with an individual who is infected chances are you will get the disease. Many people become infected after having contact with an infected person once, while other people don’t become infected until they’ve had contact for several weeks. What is known is that 2/3 of people who come in contact with the disease become infected and 2/3 of those people will become symptomatic within nine months.

Many people never become symptomatic, so just because you don’t have any symptoms doesn’t mean you have not contracted the disease, this is why so many people are getting it! The virus lays dormant and quiet in the body for months at a time, in which time you could infect several more people. Another problem is that even if you use a condom you can still infect other people because the virus can be spread anywhere skin touches skin!

You can find genital warts anywhere in and around the genitals, the anus, and even in the mouth and the throat. Most of the time you’ll start with red, swollen, or irritated skin and you’ll find that it progresses into flat fleshy or skin colored bumps, that can graduate in size.