Wart

Symptoms

Common warts usually occur on your fingers or hands and may be:

• Small, fleshy, grainy bumps
• Flesh-colored, white, pink or tan
• Rough to the touch
• Sprinkled with black pinpoints, which are small, clotted blood vessels.

Causes

Common warts are caused by an infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV). More than 100 types of HPV exist, but only a few cause warts on your hands. Other types of HPV are more likely to cause warts on your feet and other areas of your skin and mucous membranes. Most types of HPV cause relatively harmless conditions such as common warts, while others may cause serious disease such as cancer of the cervix.

You can get warts from skin-to-skin contact with people who have warts. If you have warts, you can spread the virus to other places on your own body. You can also get the wart virus indirectly by touching something that another person's wart touched, such as a towel or exercise equipment. The virus usually spreads through breaks in your skin, such as a hangnail or a scrape. Biting your nails also can cause warts to spread on your fingertips and around your nails.

Each person's immune system responds to the HPV virus differently, so not everyone who comes in contact with HPV develops warts.

Treatment of Wart

Although warts usually go away on their own, they are ugly and uncomfortable, so you may want to try treating them at home. Many warts respond well to treatments available at the drugstore.

Some things to remember:

• You can spread warts to other parts of your body, and they are contagious to others. If a treatment requires that you rub the wart with a fingernail file or a pumice stone, don’t use that utensil on any other part of your body, and don’t allow anyone else to use it.
• Don’t try to treat warts on your feet if you have diabetes. See your doctor. Diabetes can cause loss of sensation in your feet, so you can easily injure yourself without realizing it.
• Don’t try to remove warts on your face or another sensitive part of your body (such as your genitals, mouth, or nostrils) with at-home treatments.