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.
