asking for a friend: why do i keep getting warts?
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the best prevention for warts is to treat new ones as soon as they appear. getty
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dear asking for a friend,
i keep getting warts on my hands. they are not only annoying, but also very unsightly and embarrassing. any advice on how i can get rid of them?
signed,
witchy fingers
dear witchy fingers,
you’re right — warts, known as ‘common’ warts are annoying. and the grainy and rough-to-the-touch skin growths are not pretty to look at on your hands either.
however, they’re called common warts because they’re a regular occurrence for many people, and are generally harmless — although they never seem to go away fast enough. plus, it can feel like a vicious cycle when new warts appear almost as fast as old ones go away. this happens because warts shed virus cells into your skin, which allows new warts to grow around the first warts, according to the american academy of dermatology association.
but why do warts even happen?
common warts are a type of skin infection caused by the human papillomavirus (hpv) when it enters a cut or break in your skin, like a hangnail or scrape. it can actually take as long as two to six months to develop after your skin has been exposed to the virus, and is often spread by touch or through shared towels or washcloths.
“there are hundreds of different serotypes of hpv, and different serotypes tend to like different places on the body,” says dr. alexandra kuritzky, a medical and cosmetic dermatologist in vancouver and a clinical instructor in dermatology at the university of british columbia. those serotypes will generally be specific to certain parts of the body — the soles of the feet, or the hands, or the genitals.
but just so you’re clear: contracting these common warts is not a sign of illness, kuritzky stresses.
“having warts doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your immune system as a whole,” she says. “we do see certain individuals who seem to be more prone to warts, and there are even genetic syndromes of people who get particular hpv serotypes.”
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a doorknob could spread hpv
all of us come into contact with hpv repeatedly, just by touching a doorknob, for example. but only some of us develop warts.
“there may be little differences in individuals’ immune systems that might make one individual more prone to warts than another, just like one individual might be more prone to getting fungal infections like ringworm than another,” kuritzky says.
she explains that if you have a tendency to get warts, you’re up for a battle. once hpv takes hold in the skin, it stays in the uppermost level of the epidermis which is relatively immune-protected.
“there are no blood vessels up there and the immune cells, the white blood cells, don’t travel there. so your immune system remains unaware that hpv is thriving,” she says.
the virus can then infect the skin cells and replicate — and your immune system is none the wiser.
“hpv has very cleverly evolved to be able to sort of coexist in our body without our immune system finding out about it, even in a perfectly normal, healthy immune system,” she says.
how can you prevent warts?
the best prevention is to treat new warts as soon as they appear. they will eventually go away on their own, but some take as long as a year or even two, so treating them will expedite things.
kuritzky recommends maintaining good hand-washing practices, and covering cuts or abrasions with a band-aid until they’ve healed. and if you have a wart, don’t pick at it because you could cause it to spread to other areas of the skin.
beyond having the patience to wait for hand warts to go away, there is also a long list of remedies, she says, which means “that there’s no one universally effective treatment.” but she advises starting by applying duct tape to the wart to cover it. this method, called duct tape occlusion, can be weirdly successful at preventing warts from spreading.
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the next step would be to try drugstore topical preparations, like salicylic acid. take a nail file and pare the wart down, applying salicylic acid nightly. and if your warts are getting worse over time, consider seeing a doctor — a dermatologist will likely be able to advise you on another method to try.
“one of the things i always tell my patients, whether it’s something that’s over-the-counter or something that i’ve prescribed, is you just have to be more stubborn than the wart,” kuritzky says. “the expectation is often that you’re going to do the treatment for a week or two, but the reality is you may be doing this treatment for six or nine months. it can take a very long time to treat warts. and if you think you’re shrinking it, you should just keep going with what you’re doing.”
is there something about health that you (or a friend, wink, wink) have always wondered about but are too embarrassed to ask? send a note to info@healthing.ca. we promise your ‘friend’s’ secret — and identity — is safe with us!
karen hawthorne is a toronto-based writer.
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