A surgeon operating on a cancer patient managed to catch the deadly disease in what is thought to be a first-of-its-kind event. The doctor performing the surgery accidentally “transplanted” the disease into himself when his patient’s tumour cells seeped into a cut on his hand. The procedure was being carried out on a 32-year-old man from Germany, who was suffering from a rare type of cancer and was having a tumour removed from his abdomen.
The doctor suffered a cut to his hand whilst trying to place a drain in his patient during the surgery. Despite the wound being disinfected and bandaged up straight away, the 53-year-old medic noticed a hard 1.2inch lump developing at the base of his middle finger around five months later.
After visiting a hand specialist, the lump was identified as a malignant tumour genetically identical to the cancer suffered by his former patient. Doctors treating him concluded he had caught the cancer when his patient’s tumour cells seeped into the cut.
The situtaion was branded unusual by authors of the case report because the body typically rejects any foreign tissue during a traditional transplant, and the same would have been expected in the doctor's case. They concluded the surgeon's body had an "ineffective antitumour immune response" based on the tumour's development and growth.
The case, which had been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was originally reported in 1996, but has since resurfaced with renewed interest. Doctors mentioned the "accidental transplantation" of the patient's malignant fibrous histiocytoma - an ultra rare cancer with only 1,400 diagnoses reported each year.
