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.
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.
In an even more unusual case, a surgeon did once catch cancer from a person he was operating on.
However, organ donors are carefully screened for cancer so such scenarios are highly unlikely.
