What is the incubation time for HPV? How long does it take for HPV to show up after I've been exposed?
There's no way of telling when you are going to get symptoms, if you ever do. The incubation time for HPV is unknown. Sometimes it takes only a month; sometimes it takes several years. I have heard of people who were married for years and years, faithfully, and then suddenly one of them got HPV because their immune system changed and the virus had a chance to come out. Sometimes, it never shows up at all. But the person is still infected - they just don't show signs.

How can I tell who I got this virus from?
Because there's no set incubation time, it is very difficult to tell who you got HPV from. Personally, I don't know who I got it from. If you've had two partners in the past that seem questionable, you'll probably never be able to know. But, some ways of narrowing it down are:
- you can not get HPV from someone who was a virgin when you had sex (providing he/she has not had previous sexual contact)
- if someone you were sleeping with had a lot of partners (or even a few), this is a good indication
- if you had a long-time partner for years, and then you had a short-term one, and a few months later got HPV, then it is likely you got it from the short-term one
- HPV takes at least a couple of months to show up. Someone you just slept with last week didn't give it to you.

Why is there no test for HPV?
As of right now, there is no actual test to detect the HPV virus in a person's body. This is because the HPV virus does not show up in blood. (By the way, in case you were wondering, you can give blood even if you have HPV. It doesn't make a difference.) The way doctors diagnose HPV is simply to look for the symptoms (warts), or to take a pap smear if the patient is female. This is why so many people are carriers; doctors will see no signs of HPV, pronounce the person clean, and the person will go on his or her merry way and infect other people without ever knowing about the virus. Now, there is a very new development in the HPV world known as the Digene Hybrid Capture II test. This is basically a DNA test for HPV in the skin cells. Right now, it is being used on women only, to analyze which type of HPV they have if their pap smears were already abnormal. It is not widely available just yet, and it is mainly used to detect the cancer-causing types of HPV (dysplasia strains 16 and 18). The reason they can't use it on everyone is, they can certainly take a sample of your skin and test it for HPV, but you may have HPV in another part of your skin that they didn't test - thus giving you a false negative. Also, according to ASHA, the skin on a man's penis is so thick that it's hard to get a sample, so that makes for a false negative as well. But they're working on it. For more information about Digene, click here.