The gist of the article: A 41-year-old Colombian man with AIDS (i.e., immunocompromised) had an intestinal tapeworm infestation. Apparently one of the tapeworms developed a malignant tumor, or else a tapeworm cell transformed and started replicating out of control. The cancerous tapeworm cells then spread to various organs in the man’s body, killing him!
This is the first recorded instance of any sort of phenomenon like this. There are cancerous cells that can spread from dog to dog or Tasmanian devil to Tasmanian devil, but these cells are actually dog cells or Tasmanian devil cells. Not so in this poor man’s case–the cancerous cells that spread throughout his body were tapeworm-derived cells.
Yes. In addition to this case and the Tasmanian Devils mentioned by the OP,
[QUOTE=From the Article]
In humans, cancer cells are infrequently transmitted through organ transplantation or from mother to fetus during pregnancy.
[/QUOTE]
Does this mean you can give cancer to someone by taking something cancerous like a tape worm and putting it in someone’s body? Could you give someone bone cancer by scraping cancerous tissue from a bone and implanting it in someone else?
Yes but the person you give the “cancer” to may (or may not) have an immune system capable of handling it. It’s not an automatic death sentence. If the AIDS guy did not have very compromised immune system he may have been able to shrug off the tapeworm’s cancer.
Considering that transplant patients have to take immune-suppressing drugs to keep their systems from destroying perfectly healthy transplanted tissues, I would think a “cancer transplant” would be very unlikely to work on a person with a normal immune system.
