Between the commercials & decades of preventative measures available to people as young as teenagers, why isn’t general causation info more transparent?
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HPV is the virus that causes warts. Most strains of it are harmless, only a few have the potential to cause cancer.
HPV infects skin cells and spreads when dead skin cells fall off. So it’s motivated to make a lot of skin cells and it tricks the cells into dividing more (this creates a wart). On top of that HPV can integrate into the genome which causes mutations. Increased cell division + mutations is a recipe for cancer (but not a guarantee).
Fortunately there is a vaccine that can protect against the harmful strains.
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