You need a new GYN if he/she is that far behind the 8 ball. A pap smear is a brush cytology looking for dysplasia not
HPV. Even at that, it is only about 50% effective as a test, and the cervical exam is essentially visual and tactile, just like the oral cancer exam... event the precancerous lesions are the same since the disease in both cases is SCC most of the time. You need to read through the tons of
HPV stuff on the site and the past postings here to get up to speed with all this, but briefly;
There are more than 100 varieties of
HPV, only a dozen or so are know to be mutanogenic. Even if you get one of these like 16, 18, 33, etc. there is no guarantee that you will get cancer from it, many people are able to shed it from their body without consequence. It can remain dormant in your body for decades, so unless you have been celibate for at least that long, you could have contracted it long ago. While the most common sexually transferred STD, they are looking at other mechanisms of transfer, since it does not require a fluid transfer to happen like HIV. Anyone that has ever had sex could be a carrier and not know it; hence the new
HPV vaccine is given to young girls before they become sexually active. Vaginal sampling is all that is necessary to test you for it, though knowledge that you have it is of dubious value given all that we do not know about it. There is no such thing as safe sex to prevent transfer, condoms do not prevent it. But your GYN saying that they had just gotten a paper about
HPV, a virus that is the primary known cause of cervical cancer for decades, speaks volumes about this doctor. Your question about how many people have the virus in some version (the vast majority some benign version) strikes me as odd... who on this board has not had sex in their life time? Who thinks that our young people abstain from sex as teenagers?
HPV is at epidemic proportions in our society because we are a sexually active people. Thank goodness that most of the strains are benign, and that even those that get one of the bad ones have a strong chance that their immune system will get rid of it before it can do serious harm.
