Pushing her long blonde hair aside, Dawn Van Horn listens nervously for the diagnosis on the other end of the phone. After a short time on the line, she places the handset back on the receiver and erupts into tears; she’s been diagnosed with Human Papillomavirus. Her usually cheerful face is contorted with dread, confusion, and anger. She’s terrified.

“I didn’t know anything was wrong. I just got a call saying my pap came back abnormal,” says Van Horn. It was a huge shock. At thirty years old she’s always been what she calls a “good girl,” staying monogamous.
After the diagnosis, Van Horn rushed to her computer to research on the Internet and find more information about the disease. Today, she still doesn’t know much about it, citing the multitude of conflicting information on the web about HPV. “It’s kind of a mystery,” she says.

A study from the Center for Disease Control estimates that six-million sexually active Americans will be newly diagnosed with HPV each year. The latest from the CDC finds that about twenty-six percent of adolescent girls in the United States have a sexually transmitted disease; the most common in this group is HPV, with 18.3 percent. An estimated seventy-five percent of sexually active adults will have HPV at some point in their lives, according to the American Social Health Association.

There are many common misconceptions about the virus. Lynn Hanson, a UCSF nurse, says people often assume HPV manifests itself as genital warts because, with over one hundred strands of the virus, it can take on many appearances. The warts that sometimes appear are just one form of the STD.

Another misconception, which can finally be put to rest, is the idea that HPV is permanent. A report from the CDC finds ninety percent of patients are HPV-free within two years, and, in addition, the University of California has been conducting research to study the effects of HPV and the body’s ability to cure it. This study—being administered at SF State—also traces the history of HPV and the normal progression of the disease. The researchers have been working for eighteen years, and most data has yet to be analyzed.
“Some [patients] come in positive for HPV and end up with persistently negative results,” says Hanson, one of the nurses involved in the research. Still, there are big factors in how the body eliminates HPV. Smoking habits, she warns, are a primary reason people’s bodies have a hard time fighting it off.

Every four months, participants in the study fill out a questionnaire that outlines sexual behavior, birth control methods, diet, and STD history. Hanson and the other researchers also look closely at the presence of cytokines, naturally occurring cells that fight off the infection.

Many participants in the study are current SF State students, and others, who are in their thirties and forties, have been coming in since the study began, says Hanson. Some results have been published but the process of analyzing, collecting, and translating the information is continuous, and nearly two decades later the research team is enrolling another set of participants.

When the UC Department of Adolescent Medicine originally began the study, its aim was to find out how the virus is initially acquired. Thus far, Hanson says the study has spared women a lot of unnecessary treatment by learning not only how the virus is acquired but how a healthy immune system can fight it.
In the aftermath of her diagnosis, Van Horn signed up for a procedure called a colposcopy—her cervix was examined closer to determine whether the HPV was a high risk for cancer. Van Horn is still waiting on the results.

While STDs may still carry the weight of mystery and aversion, HPV has been ubiquitous in the media with new discoveries and vaccines. The best and only defense is to use a condom, but the CDC reports that even this level of precaution doesn’t guarantee protection from HPV—areas not covered by latex can transmit the virus.

The recent release of an HPV vaccine may come as a relief to those worried about becoming one of the twenty million Americans already infected with the virus, but the vaccine protects against only four of the most common strains: two that cause cancer and two that cause warts. There are still up to one hundred different strains of HPV.

Van Horn says a lot of her support has been through meeting other people who have HPV on social networking sites and support groups. “It’s good to know I’m not the only one going through this."