Warts and verrucas
Published: May 29, 2020
Warts and verrucas are disgusting-looking, and if you have them in a visible place, you will find that people will tend to avoid you. Of course this is not fair, but then life generally isn’t. I wanted to become a pop star when I was 11 and look what happened to that. Instead, I am facing unemployment…again.
Anyway, here’s a bit of sensible info if you’re actually interested in warts: Warts are small, rough lumps on the skin that are benign (non-cancerous). They often appear on the hands and feet and can look different depending on where they appear on the body and how thick the skin is. A wart on the sole of the foot is called a verruca. The clinical name for a verruca is a plantar wart.
If you’re reading this and you’re not my mum or one of my Facebook friends who has come to see whether or not I actually do work for a website called celebrities with diseases (dot com), then I advise you to stop and look at a proper health site, where someone actually knows what they’re talking about. I have no experience of medicine and as you may have guessed, I am ripping most of this information off an article written by someone with genuine interest and knowledge.
Warts are caused by infection with a virus known as the human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV causes keratin, a hard protein in the top layer of the skin (the epidermis) to grow too much. This produces the rough, hard texture of a wart.
There are several different types of warts. The more common types include:
- Common warts
- Plantar warts (verrucas)
- Plane warts
- Filiform warts
- Periungual warts
- Mosaic warts
The appearance of each type of wart will depend on several factors:
- Where it is located on your body
- The strain (type) of HPV that is responsible for the wart
- Factors such as whether you have a weakened immune system
- Whether you have rubbed or knocked the wart
Apparently most people get warts at some point in their lives and they are more common in teenagers and adults. I remember having a verruca on my foot when I was about 10. I think I caught it at the swimming pool. So, parents, make sure your kids wear flip-flops when they go to the pool! Otherwise they will grow to resent you. The treatment was actually pretty horrific and it hurts. They do this thing where they dry-freeze your warts. You know in crap sci-fi films when they open a vault with some long-forgotten treasure and there’s all this unexplicable smoke. Well that’s what it looks like when they open the verucca-freezing-liquid pot.
Images: Wikipedia
Posts you might also find interesting:
Leave a Reply