Thursday, August 30, 2007

Concern about getting infected again

Many women worry about becoming infected again after they have had treatment for an abnormal smear. Viruses are difficult to treat and your body gets rid of them by developing immunity to them. This may take from a few months to a few years.Some women worry about whether their partner has the virus and could reinfect them. Men aren’t routinely tested for HPV because the only way for a man to find out if he has the virus is to have several biopsies. Even then, a negative result only means that HPV wasn’t found on those biopsies and not necessarily that he doesn’t have HPV at all. Because our bodies clear the virus, even if a man has the virus when he has the test, his immune system may get rid of it before the test result comes back.As there more than 100 types of HPV, it is possible to be immune to one type but not another. So it may seem that you have been reinfected but in fact you may just have a different type of HPV.