Dear Alice, A little over one year ago, I was diagnosed with genital warts. I was prescribed condylox, which I applied to the affected areas. Eventually, I decided that the treatment caused me more discomfort than the warts themselves, so I stopped using it. They have since then slowly disappeared.
Genital warts result from a virus, which is incurable but intermittently active and inactive.
Unfortunately, the virus's activity level cannot always be determined by the human eye, especially because the virus can affect you internally as well as externally. Unprotected sex cannot be recommended at any time, and especially when there is a possibility of an outbreak. To make it more confusing, there are multiple strains of the HPV genital wart virus, which means that even if your partner has HPV, you may have a different strain of the virus, and, therefore, could infect her with a form of the virus that she does not have. This is important because certain strains of the HPV virus are associated with cell changes that can lead to cervical cancer.