Cancer is not contagious
If someone's injected with cancer cells, they develop cancer. Could at least part of the increase in cancer be to do with people getting cancer cells inside their bodies, similar to a viral outbreak?
Submitted 1 week ago by cbthunderhead@lemmy.cafe to [deleted]
Comments
Snailpope@lemmy.world 1 week ago
cbthunderhead@lemmy.cafe 1 week ago
Tell that to the people who developed cancer after being injected with it, then, proving that cancer will develop in a person if those cells end up in their body.
Snailpope@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You brought up coughing or blood transference both of which have shown not to transfer cancer. You would understand this if you actually read the article
janonymous@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t think foreign cells survive in your body. Even if they were injected, I’d expect them to die, because they are not going to get integrated in your body.
cbthunderhead@lemmy.cafe 1 week ago
Cancer cells are a bit like HIV in that they evade the immune system by releasing some chemical to trick it. So even if it is another person’s cancer cells, the cancer will metastasize in the body.
chewypoops@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This was one experiment by a guy who was criminally convicted for his illegal methodology for the same experiment. His experiments never reached the conclusion you are claiming, generally because his victims were cancer patients who already had cancer.
Half a century of medical research following this experiment suggests that cancer is not contagious in any real way. Comparing this to HIV is wild when in your OP you claim that transmissible cancer is somehow airborne. Apparently you think that people are just breathing out lung cells or something…
Your whole tone here is coming across as “14 year old who just read about a medical atrocity and thinks it would be edgy to evangelize human butchery as respectable medical science”. Southam was a quack, and treating his experiments as scientifically sound is a form of malice.
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
My job is a data analyst, working on genetic cancer research. Now sadly, I don’t have a direct answer to your question, but I do know a few things about cancer.
For the most part, cancer is not contagious. There is an exception, and it’s a sexually transmitted cancer for dogs known as CTVS. Some poor dog developed cancer 11,000 years ago, and the cancer cells mutated enough that they became essentially an asexual, single-celled organism. I point this out as a factor as to why it’s not contagious for almost all cancers: and that’s because cancer cells need their host. The danger from cancer is caused by mutant cells that have lost their apoptosis signal and begin reproducing uncontrollably, not that we have a bunch of invincible cells floating in our body.
Some cancers like lung cancer develop as tumors, while others like leukemia are circulating. Lung cancer probably won’t aerosolize, but even if it did, the cells need to survive for long enough to reach a new host. To reach a new host circulating cancers like Leukemia would need to be ingested and then survive the digestive system.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You keep referencing some guy that located cancerous cells, invasively removed them and put them into someone else.
Unless there’s been a recent influx of people doing the exact same process to people without them knowing, I don’t see how it could possibly correlate with increased cancer diagnosis.
Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s been a while since I seen you or one of your alts. The answer is yes cancer jumps around from person to person like the flu, but you can drowned it in shallow canals to stop it.
fullsquare@awful.systems 1 week ago
cancer is in large part an old people disease, if you avoided dying of cholera you’re more likely to die of something else. also now there’s a lot of people who were exposed to carcinogens decades back, and we got better at treating pr preventing some other common causes of death like stroke or heart disease
celeste@kbin.earth 1 week ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5946918/ oh hey here's a study that goes into the cases when cancer has transferred.
In humans, a lot of things have to go wrong for transmission to happen.
It can also happen in organ transplants, since the recipient has to be on immunosuppressants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer
It doesn't seem like there are case studies about transferring the cancer cells through the air. People can also get diseases that can lead to cancer from each other, but that's not the same thing.
cbthunderhead@lemmy.cafe 1 week ago
And yet, the Southam experiments proved that if someone is injected with cancer cells of another person, they develop cancer, proving that cancer cells ending up in the body poses the danger of transmission, just like with a virus.
chewypoops@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Southam’s experiments never proved anything. They earned Southam multiple criminal convictions for experimenting on people without their consent. His victims already had cancer, because he experimented on cancer patients. Stop spreading medical disinformation.