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Scientists Ponder the Prospect of Contagious Cancer (cnbc.com)
Cancer causes many deaths each year, and anyone that's lost someone to cancer knows how painful and grueling it can be. The one saving grace is that it ultimately only kills the host. But is this changing? According to several recent papers, scientists have suggested that cancer could become contagious. Cancer cells could have the ability to metastasize, not just from organ to organ, but from person to person. While this is not an imminent threat, it has already happened in unusual circumstances.
Well that escalated quickly.
Apparently the Tazmanian Devils in Tazmania are currently suffering for a contagious cancer outbreak. Devils get into fights and claw each other's noses, the cancer cells transfer into the wounds and multiply. Screws up their faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
So for humans, it would be sorta like a zombie-like plague...
There is a nasty cancer which is decimating the population of Tasmanian Devils. It forms lumps and lesions in and around the mouth meaning the animal eventually starves to death. This cancer is spread through contact.
That said it is believed that a lack of genetic diversity is a major reason in why the healty devils body doesn't recognise the invading cancer cell as coming from another animal.
http://www.tassiedevil.com.au/...
His erect penis,
Plugged inside a man's anus.
He is a faggot.
The Human Papiloma Virus for example. There are probably many other cancers that are caused by viruses. These diseases are just difficult to catch, but you can catch some of them from another person.
I suppose it should be easy to give cancer to your clone or to your twin...
Otherwise its going to be fairly unusual... cancers that can evade the immune system, etc... or in immune-compromised hosts.
One puzzle is why evolution has resulted in humans (and the vast majority of other organisms) having a limited lifespan with frequent breeding. Superficially, it would seem more efficient to invest less in the ability to procreate, but permit unlimited healthy lifespans. I have an hypothesis which I think fits with the content of TFA. Frequent breeding allows natural selection to counteract emerging diseases. Where a disease evolves that threatens to wipe out a species, genetic diversity provides an excellent chance that some individuals will be resistant. These resistant individuals can breed to aid species regeneration after being decimated by such a disease.
Um, nothing in the article said anything about cancer becoming airborne. I didn't think it was fear mongering at all. Instead, it suggested that cancer spreading from one host to another is within the realm of possibility and not that it's likely to occur in humans.
There are diseases that are transmissible in humans that can cause cancer. HPV is an example. The article makes it pretty clear that in just about every case there are enough defenses to make it impossible. For it to occur, it must be easy for cancer cells to pass from one person to another. Accidentally injecting oneself with cancer is a way for it to happen. The other example involved a person whose immune system was compromised and the source of the cancer was a parasite. Because conditions like this are rarely met, it's virtually impossible for cancer to be transmitted from one person to another.
It seems like there has to be an easy pathway for many cancer cells to move from one person to another. This is extremely rare. It also seems like compromising or fooling the immune system makes it far more likely to occur. This is far more likely to occur among animals than among humans. I think the article makes it clear that what's possible isn't likely nor is it a threat right now.
I don't get your criticism of the article.
That you think that this idea is revolutionary shows just how little the average person understands evolution. This is well explored as a theme in both science (genetics, evolution, natural selection) and fiction (vampire books come to light but it's not the only genre in which this has been explored).
Respectfully advise you to spend less time reading forums and more time reading classics. No one else is going to make them responsible for your education.
Probably because Hitler had a micropenis.
Evolutionary Origins of Cancer --"A 1.6 Billion-Year-Old Accident Waiting to Happen" http://bit.ly/18a3ul5
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Please mod the parent -1 redundant. All of the information in the above post was also in TFA.
The information that the information in the above post is in TFA, is already in TFA and the above post, which makes your post similarly redundant yet lacking any redeeming qualities.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Decimate == reduce by 1/10th
There's also a canine cancer that transmits through sexual contact:
...
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"canine transmissible venereal sarcoma (CTVS), sticker tumors and infectious sarcoma is a histiocytic tumor of the external genitalia of the dog and other canines, and is transmitted from animal to animal during mating."
"The tumor cells are themselves the infectious agents, and the tumors that form are not genetically related to the host dog.[1] Although the genome of a CTVT is derived from a canid (probably a dog, wolf or coyote), it is now essentially living as a unicellular, asexually reproducing (but sexually transmitted) pathogen.[2] Sequence analysis of the genome suggests it diverged from canids over 6,000 years ago; possibly much earlier"
"believed to be the longest continually propagated cell lineage in the world"
the Human papillomavirus?
On a more serious note, shouldn't we be a little bit more worried about AIDS? For some unknown reason, people have recently been behaving as if this was not much of a concern, but in any nation where there are people of African descent, this should be very much a concern. While being gay is not a crime, nor is it offensive in any way, being downlow (which usually involves a gay man marrying a straight woman, having kids, and cheating on her with other men) should be a crime. I mean, WTF.
Seriously. Is that what being black is all about?
#blacklivesmatter...???
LOL?
Do you really think he bothered to read the article? Where do you think you are?
There are definitely some cases: http://gizmodo.com/horrified-doctors-find-crazy-tapeworm-cancer-in-patie-1740840754
Cancer doesn't care about host, it only cares about getting enough nutrients from the host. As long as Immune system doesn't kill it - it has no reason 'to be scared'. I am not a biologist in any shape and form. But I can see cancer as a virus/bacteria or mad cow disease or something, in this sense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Good thing that *most* humans don't go around biting the faces of any other random humans they run into.
Bath Salts, we just need moar bath salts then this will happen all the time!
There was a Russian scientist who claimed all cancers were caused by viruses, unfortunately I can't find the link on Ars and I'm lazy at this hour. But what if all cancers do come from a virus type that we don't have the ability to detect yet (and we aren't trying to)? It's fascinating to think about, but then look at AIDs, we've know the virus that causes it for decades and still can't cure it (although some will state it's a manageable illness now).
That's a good point. If the cause of a cancer is contagious, then for all intents and purposes it's a contagious cancer.
This could account for the spread of conservatism in the body politic of many Western countries. :-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This is what I don't understand. Cancer develops, becomes a life-threatening/metastatic tumour because one or more mutated cells have managed to avoid or fool numerous detection and termination processes in a particular individual. I may be more likely to develop a cancer of a particular type because a relative has had it - but that implies a susceptibility because of very similar DNA (for want of a better term - and my GP tells me that the non-hodgkins lymphoma that killed my mother is NOT one of the genetically likely types), or because northern european/irish types have a particular susceptibility to a particular type/s of cancer. I *might* be likely to transmit a mutated cell, leading to a tumour, to a person of similar genotype (for want of a better word) , but as I'm a fair-skinned northern european/irish type, how could my 'fooled' immune system be similar enough to be similar enough to anyone outside my genetic "region"? e.g. asian, african, even southern european.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Cancer doesn't care about anything. That's the point of suffering cancer. But cancer cells at large survive and can successfully suppress immune response by being pretty similar to the host in terms of surface proteins and other antigens. At least to the point where a large enough tumor forms. It is further protected by the scale factor.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOTlNOZB4Zo
There is also the Clam.
https://www.mixcloud.com/thisw... This is an excelent podcast on virology.
Or for those more into the heavier stuff: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm slightly surprised that the notion of contagious cancer is being presented as something new. I've known about cats and FeLV for decades and I'm not exactly a scientist, epidemiologist or medical researcher.
Because conditions like this are rarely met, it's virtually impossible for cancer to be transmitted from one person to another.
It seems like there has to be an easy pathway for many cancer cells to move from one person to another. This is extremely rare. It also seems like compromising or fooling the immune system makes it far more likely to occur.
O Rh- blood type (or just locally prevailing blood type) cancer patient, a mosquito bite ... connect the dots. It is extremely rare though, because of epidemiological reasons - infection that slow and with so many obstacles to spreading cannot sustain its own chain of transmission. It could had been more deadly in time before we had so much genetic diversity of our immune system.
Um, nothing in the article said anything about cancer becoming airborne. I didn't think it was fear mongering at all. Instead, it suggested that cancer spreading from one host to another is within the realm of possibility and not that it's likely to occur in humans.
There are diseases that are transmissible in humans that can cause cancer. HPV is an example. The article makes it pretty clear that in just about every case there are enough defenses to make it impossible. For it to occur, it must be easy for cancer cells to pass from one person to another. Accidentally injecting oneself with cancer is a way for it to happen. The other example involved a person whose immune system was compromised and the source of the cancer was a parasite. Because conditions like this are rarely met, it's virtually impossible for cancer to be transmitted from one person to another.
It seems like there has to be an easy pathway for many cancer cells to move from one person to another. This is extremely rare. It also seems like compromising or fooling the immune system makes it far more likely to occur. This is far more likely to occur among animals than among humans. I think the article makes it clear that what's possible isn't likely nor is it a threat right now.
I don't get your criticism of the article.
Aside from HPV, I expect they will find that within the variety of cancers, a good portion of them are triggered by viruses that don't have any visible effects like HPV, and are never therefore noticed. Not all viruses that might infect a host do much to the host, in fact, it's better for the virus if they DONT.
Either the research isn't technically feasible yet, or researchers just aren't interested in the question.
Also note, there are documented cases of Wombats getting nose-cancer and spreading it through the entire den of animals. In that case, an affected animal has saliva and mucus coming out of the nose, and contacting other animals with thin skin and membranes in their own noses.
When the breakthroughs happen, there is going to be a great sadness when thinking of the obviousness of the issues despite the losses that occurred while looking at other solutions.
Not wombats, Tasmanian Tigers.
Between 1954 and 1963, close to 98 million Americans received polio vaccinations contaminated with a carcinogenic monkey virus, now known as SV40.
http://amzn.com/0312278721
It may sound like the stuff of conspiracy buffs, but it is in fact a true story. Doctors had to go in front of congress and testify to get the contaminated vaccines pulled.
I had a brother in the age range to have gotten this polio vaccine, and he died from a brain tumor in his early 50s. Anecdotal, yes. Dead, yes.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
And of course, we make ourselves vulnerable to cancer from the crap we eat and the lack of exercise. Younger and younger people are now getting cancer, so we are making ourselves good hosts from a very young age:
Once considered an older person’s disease, colorectal cancer is showing up in individuals as young as 20 years old.
http://www.havasunews.com/opin...
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Nice to know the science is finally catching up....
We know the HPV triggers cancer. We know that the Tasmanian Devils are suffering from it. I suspect that some brain cancers are in fact contagious. Had a friend working on a research team on brain cancer, who then contracted it.
Thats why.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Is this due to GMO cancer experiments?
Right. And we were supposed to see airborne HIV by 1990 if we didn't immediately spend millions of taxpayer dollars supporting HIV researchers.
And, let's not get started on "The Earth is Going to Melt This Year if I Don't Get My $5M Grant Renewed" climate alarmism.
It's not a problem until it's a problem. And, right now, it's not a problem. Cancer doesn't spread via contagion vectors, and current science (that is, science, not speculation, and not anecdote) says there is no mechanism for that to happen.
A more interesting question is, Why is contagious cancer still so rare, given a billion years and a multiplicity of vectors that have spread every other kind of disease over large regions? We see contagious viri that cause cancer in infected individuals (HPV, Hep C) but so far only three transmissible cancers across all the world's species. Finding out what there is about cancer that limits it to one individual could be the key we have been looking for.
The same mechanism behind organ transplant rejection is a pretty substantial reason. Cancer gets a boost in it's native body because it's "part of me" and so the immune system has trouble recognizing it. An arbitrary other human's cells in my body are much more likely to be treated as an infection and destroyed as such.
Finding out what there is about cancer that limits it to one individual could be the key we have been looking for.
It's the same thing that requires you to take immunosuppressants when you receive an organ transplant. Your cancer is you, and someone else's cancer is not. Your body has a much easier time recognizing that transmitted cancer is a foreign infection that needs to be fought off.
I think you mean Tasmanian Devils, not wombats. Also there is a domestic canine tumor that is sexually transmissible.
I read a while back that a surgeon accidentally got cancer from one of his surgical patients:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
So, it appears that cancer can move between hosts in a mechanical fashion.
Warts/moles are transmissible in humans and can become malignant tissue.
Like Simoncini's claim that cancer are all caused by fungus (the reason he thinks that are trivially laughable). Fact is, that we know that some type of cancer are caused by virus others are documented to be by carcinogene substance. Exposing a mice to benzene or formaldehyde does not suddenly make a virus spontaneously appear and be missed by generation of scientist which think carcinogene exists. So claima s such you cited seem to belong to the crank category. And yes we have the ability to detect even very small virus and we did & do routinely search for them in research case - if only to eliminate that explanation.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Cancers cause crazy replication of the victims own cells. The defenses we have against most diseases are of the form "Recognize something that isn't me and kill it!" - but cancer cells are pretty much identical to regular cells - which is why curing cancer is so hard.
But the idea of someone else's cancer cell getting into my body and running amok isn't such a big deal because their cells are not recognized as "me" - and my regular defenses should attack them just like a bacterial infection - and just like we reject organ transplants without anti-rejection drugs.
The case of the Tasmanian Devil face cancer is instructive - their problem is a drastic lack of genetic diversity that makes it harder for them to recognize "self" from "other" when "other" is genetically so close to "self". I could certainly imagine a cancer jumping between a pair of identical twins - and all tasmanian devils are alarmingly closely related.
The dog STD cancer may have similar roots. Pedigree dogs are well known to suffer from a lack of genetic diversity - and we inbreed them to a crazy degree.
What's more of a concern is that we know that some forms of cancer are caused by viral infections - clearly the original virus could get transmitted - and the net effect would be of a transmissible cancer. THAT is a major concern.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
No, the contagious cancer is genetically related to each other instance. Cancers generated via virus in two different individuals will be as distantly related as the individuals.
Contagious cancer is rare for the same reason that organ transplant is hard: your immune system already largely ignores your own cells, of which cancer is just a broken subtype of. Implanting random tissues from other individuals causes rejection of the tissue unless they are closely related to you and you take immunosuppressants. For this same reason, foreign cancer would be expected to be quickly destroyed unless you had AIDs or similar. I don't have a link handy, but I do recall reading a story about a man who had AIDs and contracted cancer from an ill intestinal worm (or other helminth... I can't recall). This would be especially unusual: cross species cancer should light up all the red flags in your immune system, but obviously his was especially degraded.
Be Afraid! You need the government to protect you!
It's also important to note that Tasmanian Tigers are nearly genetically identical, which is why the cancer can spread. Their immune system's can't tell the difference between their cells and another Tiger's cells.
Feline leukemia virus is certainly contagious among cats, so there's no reason to believe that other viruses can't transmit cancer as well.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Not if Monsanto has anything to say about it.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
What sort of moron would have sex with a wombat?
Eventually, someday, someone will discover the cancer that destroys cancer....
Only a cancer can catch it, and it will have to be spreadable through sex... by the host cancers host...
Then we will all be trying to catch and spread it... assisting the cancers cancer propagation... LOL...
Boosting the immune system to fight cancer;
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21693185-boosting-immune-system-fight-cancer-mr-t-cell
Casteism