NO CURE FOR VENEREAL WARTS

Report #6367 11/19/94

A study in October's Journal of Reproductive Medicine shows that the conventional treatment with laser, anticancer creams and acids can cure visible large venereal warts, but they do not get rid of the small invisible ones in a woman's vagina. (1)

Most warts go away by themselves with time, but some will remain and can eventually cause cancer of the opening to the uterus and penis and possibly the prostate, with older people more likely to have persistent warts.(2) Venereal warts are the most-common venereal disease in the United States today, affecting from 25 to 50% of sexually-active polygamous men and women. They can appear as small bumps on the skin around the genital area, they can form growths the size of a baseball or they can be so small that they can't be seen by the naked eye.

All women who have ever had venereal warts must be followed with PAP smears regularly for the rest of their lives. Before a woman develops cervical cancer, normal cells in the opening to the uterus change slowly to become increasingly more premalignant. A doctor uses a wooden stick to scrape cells from the opening of the cervix and places them on a special slide. Then the cells on the slides are analyzed to see if they look premalignant of malignant. If they do, the doctor usually gives a woman antibiotics to see if the Pap smear will return to normal. If it doesn't, the doctor usually removes or destroys cells lining the opening to the uterus, before they become a cancer.

By Gabe Mirkin, M.D., for CBS Radio News