Some lite reading on transmissible cancer

School starts up again next week. To get ready, here's some lite reading on transmissible cancer from Harper's. Bet you thought cancer wasn't communicable, didn't you?

The phenomenon of transmissible tumors isn’t confined to canines, Tasmanian devils, and Syrian hamsters. There have been human cases, too...

Low immune response also figures in two other situations in which tumor transmission is known to occur: pregnancy and organ transplant. A mother sometimes passes cancer cells to her fetus in the womb. And a transplanted organ sometimes carries tiny tumors into the recipient, vitiating the benefits of receiving a life-saving liver or kidney from someone else. Cases of both kinds are very rare...

Other cases are less easily explained. In 1986, two researchers from the National Institutes of Health reported that a laboratory worker, a healthy nineteen-year-old woman, had accidentally jabbed herself with a syringe carrying colon-cancer cells; a colonic tumor grew in her hand, but she was rescued by surgery. More recently, a fifty-three-year-old surgeon cut his left palm while removing a malignancy from a patient’s abdomen, and five months later he found himself with a palm tumor, one that genetically matched the patient’s tumor. His immune system responded, creating an inflammation around the tumor, but the response was insufficient and the tumor kept growing. Why? How? It wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. Again, though, surgery delivered a full cure. And then there’s Henri Vadon. He was a medical student in the 1920s who poked his left hand with a syringe after drawing liquid from the mastectomy wound of a woman being treated for breast cancer. Vadon, too, developed a hand tumor. Three years later, he died of metastasized cancer because neither the surgical techniques of his era nor his own immune system could save him.

via BoingBoing