WARTS

Abstract

This article is intended to clear up a few scattered points in the natural history of warts and to ascertain the types of therapy in common use today. Warts are autoinoculable and transmissible.¹The incubation period after experimental inoculation varies from one to twenty-one months and averages four months. It has been demonstrated that infection by a virus causes warts, and this observation has been confirmed by a number of investigators.² Warts occur not only in human beings but in cattle, dogs and rabbits.³The viruses causing warts are, in general, species specific; hence it is not possible to acquire warts from contact with an infected animal. Wart viruses are not only species specific but also epitheliotropic; that is, they invade only cells of epithelial origin. In rabbits, two separate viruses have been isolated, one of which causes cutaneous warts⁴and the other warts of the