How a surgeon caught cancer from a patient he was operating on

Cancer isn’t contagious – you can’t pick it up the way you’d catch a virus – but there are very rare cases where cancer has been transferred from one person to another.

It has happened, for example, that cancer cells from an organ donor have caused cancer to grow in the recipient.

Usually a person’s blood will reject another individual’s cancerous cells, but organ recipients take medicines to weaken their immune systems, helping to reduce the chance their body rejects the transplanted organ. This means they’re more suspectable to accepting a donor’s cancer cells.

However, organ donors are carefully screened for cancer so such scenarios are highly unlikely.

In an even more unusual case, a surgeon did once catch cancer from a person he was operating on.

The doctor was performing a procedure on a 32-year-old man from Germany, who was having a tumor removed from his abdomen.

In the middle of the operation, the surgeon accidently cut the palm of his left hand while trying to place a drain in his patient.

The wound was disinfected and bandaged immediately, but five months later the 53-year-old doctor noticed a small lump developing where the injury had happened.

He had the lump tested and it turned out to be a malignant tumour with cells that were genetically identical to the cancer carried by his former patient.

His medical team concluded that the cancer must have been transferred when he cut his hand.

The tumour was removed and a scan two years later showed the cancer hadn’t spread.

Although the 32-year-old patient survived the operation, he sadly died afterwards due to complications.

The case was originally reported on in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, but has recently resurfaced and shared on a several sites.

In the report, doctors describe the ‘accidental transplantation’ of the patient’s malignant fibrous histiocytoma – a rare type of cancer that forms in soft tissue with just 1,400 diagnoses per year. 

They say the case was very unusual because a body – especially one that’s not been affected by immune suppressing medicine – would normally reject foreign tissue.

The authors wrote: ‘Normally, transplantation of allogeneic tissue from one person to another induces an immune response that leads to the rejection of the transplanted tissue.

‘In the case of the surgeon, an intense inflammatory reaction developed in the tissue surrounding the tumor, but the tumor mass increased, suggesting an ineffective antitumor immune response.’

The authors speculate the tumour ‘escaped immunologic destruction through several mechanisms,’ including changes to molecules in its cells and a failure in the surgeon’s body to recognise and attack tumour cells effectively.

There are no statistics on ‘transplanted’ cancer, but it’s considered to be extremely rare.

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