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Comment by kenny11 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and there are even vaccines for them:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hpv-infection...

HPV is a virus (human papillomavirus) that can cause cancer, whereas with devil facial tumour disease the cancer itself spreads.

This means the cells that form the devil facial tumour are genetically identical across all individual animals infected with it. Normal cancer cells are your own cells which have developed a genetic abnormality, not somebody else's! As I understand it, an HPV infection increases the chance that one of your own cells will develop a genetic abnormality and become cancerous.

The distinction you are drawing is not relevant to the question or supported by the original claim:

>> The Devil Facial Tumour Disease" they suffer from is one of the few non-viral transmittable cancers.

That phrasing obviously contemplates the existence of viral transmissible cancers such as HPV.

If one person states "this is one of the few known non-viral transmissible cancers", and someone else follows up with the question "are there any transmissible cancers in humans?", how does information on transmissible cancers in humans get judged off-topic? Nobody asked "are there any non-viral transmissible cancers in humans?".

I read "are there any transmissible cancers in humans?" in the context as referring to cancers that are themselves transmissible like devil facial tumor disease. (It appears every result in the first few pages of a Google search for the term "transmissible cancer" refers to transmission of cancer cells themselves, not cancers caused by infectious agents.)

The context explicitly distinguishes "transmissible cancers" from "non-viral transmissible cancers". That's only possible when "transmissible cancers" includes cancers that are transmitted by viruses.

I can see both sides of this, though as a data point I also read it as "viral or otherwise".

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