If you think that sexually transmitted diseases are lim¬ited to gonorrhea, syphilis and AIDS, guess again. One of the real biggies is warts-genital warts, caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). "In the college-age pop~lation, it's one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases we see. And even though HPV used to be thought of as little more than a nuisance, we now know that these infections need to be taken seriously," says, M. D., director of Student Health Services at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Some researchers estimate that the incidence of genital warts has doubled in the past decade-something like three million new cases ofthese infections are diagnosed annually in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Their favorite target: young, sexually active people in their teens and twenties, especially women. The main danger, researchers now believe, is that several kinds ofHPV play an important role in the development of certain kinds of cancer, especially cervical cancer.