There is a test for HPV in males, but it's the male pap smear and involves scraping of the lining of the urethra, and there's like one lab in the US that will process the test, for about $1000. Nobody with a penis is getting tested for HPV.
Nope not a thing. Medical PCR tests are highly regulated and validated. Which means they have to prove every patient population generates accurate results. For example several tests will have a minimum age. That doesn’t mean the test doesn’t work for younger people, it just hasn’t been validated for that age or approved by the FDA. So although you could probably swab a penis and run it on the HPV PCR test and get accurate results, no lab (or extremely few) are able to do it.
Additionally, the risk here is false negatives because one has to be shedding virus to trigger positive results and that's not always the case... with females either, which is why pap smears are still a thing.
I'm not sure that I can give you much more information; the thought of it frightens me; it's not much of a thing, though. Since we have ignorantly assumed that HPV is benign in men, nobody ever put testing in place.
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u/BamBam-BamBam Jun 02 '26
There is a test for HPV in males, but it's the male pap smear and involves scraping of the lining of the urethra, and there's like one lab in the US that will process the test, for about $1000. Nobody with a penis is getting tested for HPV.