How did I get a wart on my finger? Who to blame

So you just noticed a "bump" on your hand. You wonder what it is and found out that you unfortunately have a finger wart. But the question that's really bothering you is "how did I get this?"

There are many ways you could have gotten that wart. But in the end it all comes down to you having made contact with the root cause of warts, the human papillomavirus, or HPV for short. When your skin makes contact with the virus, it gets into any cut or breaks in your skin. Once infected, your skin cells multiply quickly and build up to create the bump.

Making contact with the virus could be directly with another wart itself. Or it could have been a surface or object that has been contaminated through recent contact with a wart.

Possible surfaces include public areas such as a locker room and a swimming pool. It could also include the shower handles in the locker room and even the benches. Perhaps you rested your hands on a chair somewhere and prior to you sitting there, someone with warts had done the same thing.

Or maybe you had greeted someone with a handshake unaware of that person’s wart on their fingers or hands.  Maybe you used someone's hand towel and the person that towel belonged to had warts.

The list of possibilities can go on for quite a bit. It's almost impossible to pinpoint where and when exactly you got infected with the virus s that lead to your wart.  The closest you can narrow it down is probably just that whoever you got the virus from, he or she was suffering from the common wart. Also one other thing is absolute. It is not genital warts (a sexually transmitted disease). More on this is explained below.

There are over 150 HPV strains. Each strain prefers specific areas of the human body. They are not likely to change their preference and go somewhere else. That means the common wart, which is comply found on the hands will not spread to other areas like the genitals.  Vice versa genitals warts will likely not spread to your hands.

Knowing this, the only thing we can safely assume is you got warts from someone else. You also did not get genital warts (the real nasty kind). Pinpointing who it was is nearly impossible, so the best thing to do is just move on to treating it.