Doctor catches cancer from patient after surgery, here's how

In a rare and shocking medical case, a 53-year-old surgeon has been diagnosed with cancer after accidentally cutting his hand during surgery to remove a tumor from a patient’s abdomen.

According to a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the surgeon cut his hand while placing a drain in the patient, allowing tumor cells to enter the wound. Despite immediate disinfection and bandaging, the surgeon developed a malignant tumor five months later.

Tests revealed that the tumor was genetically identical to the cancer suffered by the patient, leading medical professionals to conclude that the surgeon had “caught” the cancer through accidental transplantation.

The case is believed to be the first of its kind, and has sparked interest among medical professionals due to its rarity. Typically, the body’s immune system rejects foreign tissue, but in this case, the surgeon’s body had an “ineffective antitumor immune response,” allowing the tumor to grow.

The patient who underwent the initial surgery died due to complications, but the surgeon has made a full recovery after having the tumor removed. Two years later, there are no signs of the cancer returning or spreading.

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.

Usually a person’s blood will reject another individual’s cancerous cells, but organ recipients take medicines to weaken their immune systems, helping to reduce the chance their body rejects the transplanted organ. This means they’re more suspectable to accepting a donor’s cancer cells.