I am sure that Brian will have better info but here is what I know.

There is no treatment for HPV, like most other viruses

To find out whether you have HPV you would have to obtain a specimen of your biopsy and have it sent to a specialty lab.

It stays in the body forever.

No one knows whether it can re-manifest itself again as cancer - I asked Brian that very question about 5 minutes ago.

Transmission: that's tricky. Some doctors feels it is an issue of the amount of exposure over time. The immune system of the other party plays a role as well. I would suspect that it can be transmitted genitally and/or orally if the virus is active (and I'm really guessing there because the herpes virus can be passed when it is not active). This is certainly an area needing more basic research.

I would guess that under the right conditions you could pass this to a partner. It is an STD.

There is no Wrights (or other) stain test for this virus that I know of. It can go dormant like herpes zoster and is nearly impossible to detect while in that state.

These are NOT naive questions - they are very good ones and we would all like to see some more research on this.

Also the efficaciouness of the new vaccine may play a role (Gardasil). It is really on the frontier of modern medicine.