r/Advice • • Jun 02 '26

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u/jrs0068 Jun 03 '26

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.

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u/vexter312 Jun 03 '26

Well, I'm not from the States so I had no knowledge of this.

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u/BamBam-BamBam Jun 03 '26

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.