Tapeworms can transmit cancer cells to humans

washingtonpost.com

26 points·mhb··7 comments

> Tapeworms can transmit their cancer cells to humans

This is freaky stuff! They're not actually sure where the cancer cells came from. They're definitely cancer-like, but they're not necessarily human cells.

I'd never thought of cancer as contagious before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

Cancer is usually not contagious for the same reason grafts are rejected.

Homozygous twins could catch one another's cancer.

Tasmanian devils have such a reduced gene pool that they suffer from a contagious form of facial cancer.

In this case, I suppose the immunosuppressive abilities of the worm allowed its cancer to infect its host.

The patient also had HIV, which explains why the cells were able to multiply.

Indeed, that definitely helped (I didn't read TFA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer has other interesting examples, including the case of a surgeon who caught his patient's cancer after getting injured during the surgery.

Sorry, NOT RELATED TO THIS POST: I wonder how some articles got to the first page even when they have 0 to very few points... this post has 8 points so far and I see posts which have > 100 points still on the second page. Is it page views?

This was the first result in Google. It may be out of date. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

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