Originally posted by: Performify
Date: June 16, 2009 at 10:31 PM
Source: https://forum.mmajunkie.com/threads/help-out-a-junkie.14540/
IIRC the current stat is that two out of three girls aged 20-25 have at least one strain of HPV. It's absolutely insane. A female gynecologist friend indicated that she felt it was closer to 80% infection rate in college girls in her practical experience, but that most of them had no idea as very few strains have regular outbound symptoms.
Edit: a bit of quick work on GOOG shows a CDC stat that 50% of people who are sexually active will have HPV. eMedTV also had a stat (non-sourced) that said "By age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have been infected with genital HPV infection."
The only question at this point for girls is if they have the strain that makes them more prone to cervical cancer / irregular paps, or if they get one of the "better" variants that don't.
If she's someone you like, let her know that it's not a huge deal, that's the most important part -- let her know that it's not freaking you out, that she'll be fine, that you guys will deal with it, and she shouldn't be afraid. Depending on how she takes this type of news, you might share with her some stats about how common it is, like "hey just so you know i happened to do a little research about what you were talking about and saw this statistic that like 66% of the female population has a strain of HPV. Sounds like it's really not that big of a deal to be worried about" But don't make a big deal out of telling her this part if you don't know that she'll take something like that well. Some girls are going to be really beaten down by the social stigma of being unclean / a slut.
But for you: honestly, odds are extremely high that any other girl you meet is going to have HPV too, unless she's a virgin. It's just a reality of dating life these days, sadly. There's not really anythign you can do about it if she's already got it, and unless you're going to keep your # of partners really low, odds are very good that you're going to be exposed multiple times. It's a lot harder for men to get, thankfully, and most frequently when men do it's as a carrier with no real outward symptoms.
It's good that they caught it early, and all it really is going to mean is that she's going to need to have more regular pap smears done. Overall her chances of serious health complications as a result are pretty low, as long as she follows through on all the preventative maintenance. Even more so than girls who are 100% healthy but don't get regular maintenance done -- early detection is more important than anything else these days, and is only going to continue to be the case as modern medicine continues to attack cancer.
Definitely encourage anyone you date / care about who hasn't to get the HPV vacine. Doens't protect against every kind, but definitely will help slow it down, otherwise we're all going to have it before long.
