Misconception #3: HPV always stays dormant for years and years.

In some cases HPV does stay dormant for a long time, but it absolutely doesn't have to. In younger females, it's been observed that precancerous lesions can come on aggressively and rapidly. I, for example, went from no HPV and years of back-to-back perfectly normal paps to HPV positivity and CIN3 in less than a year's time. (CIN3, and HSIL — which stand for grade 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions, respectively — are precursors to cervical cancer.)

Not only are lesions like these aggressive, but they "are common early events among women with incident HPV infection" and, interestingly, "the interval between incident HPV-16 or HPV-18 infection and biopsy-confirmed CIN grade 2–3 appears to be relatively short."

How short? According to a study by Winer et al.,

Contrary to the theory that prolonged infection is necessary for progression to high-grade neoplasia [11–13], our results support the hypothesis that HSILs are often an early manifestation of HPV infection in young women. Half of the incident cases of biopsy-confirmed CIN grade 2–3 in our study occurred within 14 months of an incident HPV infection.

And what about warts? They show up even faster:

The median time between detection of incident HPV-6 or HPV-11 infection and detection of genital warts was 2.9 months (IQR, 0–5.7 months).

Something to think about, no?

This is Post #3 in the series, Debunking HPV Myths. For other parts of the series, click here.