What are warts
In: Biology
Small benign tumorous growths of skin cells caused by the Human Papilllomavirus (HPV). You may have heard that viruses insert their genetic code into your cells, but *usually* they don’t actually put it into your DNA. Some viruses simply shove their code into your cells’ nuclei, where it floats around next to your DNA and gets picked up instead of it. But HPV well and truly sticks its code into your DNA, where it stays forever.
The other thing is that most viruses kill the cell in the process. They insert their DNA and then the cell builds viruses until it explodes and dies. That means there’s not a very good chance the cell will replicate and create new cells with that viral DNA. Again, HPV is a little different in that it doesn’t always activate within your cell. Sometimes the cell just…sits there and doesn’t do anything differently. That means the cell will divide and make new cells with that HPV DNA. And *sometimes* that DNA does activate, and it creates the growths in your skin cells that become warts.
Bear in mind that despite the fact that they are tumorous, they are almost always completely 100% harmless, just ugly. Most warts resolve themselves and go away – if they appear at all. When they don’t go away, there are plenty of treatments. It’s very rare that they cause problems, mostly where people don’t have access to even basic healthcare. Even more rarely does it become actual cancer that is dangerous. As much as 80% of sexually active people will get HPV sometime in their lives and most don’t even notice.
**However**, there are much more dangerous forms of HPV that, for instance, can cause cervical cancer. There are about 100 different types of HPV, only about 30 of which affect the genitals at all (which *can* but do not always cause genital warts, which are also harmless), and only a few of *those* (14) increase the risk of cervical cancer.
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