Contagious Cancer Found in Dogs

Dan East writes "Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker's sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumor cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumor cells from 40 dogs with Sticker's sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumor cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils."

Comments

It happens in humans, too.

[Skynet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV#Cancer

Make sure to use protection, Slashdotters!

oh wait....

Not Taz!!

[Rob T Firefly]

A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils.

Symptoms include dizziness, slurred speech, and violence toward woodland creatures... especially rabbits.

Re:How are these Cancer Cells?

[NearlyHeadless]

It's closest, really, to a parasite, but it's still weirder than that, since it's genetically the same species as its host.

It's genetically almost identical, but I think we can say this is a new species. It's thus a single-cell species of dog.