Should You Tell Your Partner If You Have HPV?
Saturday January 19, 2008
Recently, a reader posted a question about whether you should tell your partner if you have HPV. HPV is a common virus with serious health consequences, but is it so common that we underestimate the health effects? I spoke to a group recently who had mixed feelings about telling their partner. Here are some of the responses:
"It's not like it AIDS. My business is my business."Some felt honesty was the best policy, but a strong majority felt it would be too awkward to tell their partner. What would you do?
"Absolutely! Your partner has a right to know if you have a illness."
"It's too embarrassing. I would die before I told my girlfriend."
Comments
If you’ve never before had or never before even heard about genital warts, then you won’t know what genital warts look like. This could of course, all be for the good. If they aren’t on you, and sometimes even when they are, genital warts can be a frightening sight to those of faint stomachs. In other words, they’re not a pretty sight to behold, but they are unfortunately a fact of life, especially in this day and age when sexually transmitted diseases are becoming more and more common.
If this is your worry and you’re afraid that you might have genital warts but are too embarrassed to see your doctor, you might first want to find out what genital warts look like.
This is something I’m still not sure about– there are more gray areas here and this is not the same as, say, telling someone you have Herpes. Concerning low-risk HPV (genital warts strain), I think absolutely you must tell a potential sexual partner that you have or recently had an outbreak as this is very contagious.
But high-risk HPV is a bit different and affects the sexes divergently. Women can develop cervical cancer from this strain whereas men are not typically affected by this (yes, I know that it can cause penile and anal cancers, but these are pretty rare). If most sexually active adults will contract HPV at some point in their lives, how does telling a male partner that one is infected with the high-risk type going to change anything? I understand this is more an ethical/honesty call more than anything, but in the long run, I’m not sure I see what the point is in telling heterosexual male partners that one has high-risk HPV. Also, how does this woman not know if her potential male partner already has high-risk HPV if there are no tests for men? I feel like if you’re to engage in sexual activity, it’s safest to assume that the person you’re going to be with already has HPV. This is because there are no tests for men, so how are women going to know that their future partners don’t already have (at least high risk) HPV? I know this may be a bit of a negative outlook, but this *is* the most common STI in the world and is a marker for having had sex at some point.
That said, I do believe honesty in relationships is important and going through abnormal paps, tests, etc, is something you might want to share with your partner as they can be there in a supportive sense. So this is why I’m still on the fence about this question — part of me thinks it’s imperative that you tell partner so you can have an honest relationship, but at the same time HPV is quite a manageable virus and MOST sexually active people have/had/will have it, so is there a point in telling them? Difficult call, what do others think?