Cancer can be contagious in extremely exceptional conditions. The biologist José Tubio recalls the case of a German surgeon who sustained a small wound on his left hand while removing a malignant tumor. Five months later, the patient's cancer had grown on a finger of the doctor. In Japan, two children suffered lung tumors generated from uterine carcinoma cells that their mothers had on the day of delivery. It is estimated that just one in every 500,000 mothers with cancer You transmit it to your children through the placenta. In mollusks, Tubío explains, transmissible cancer is much more common. In a can of cockles there may be several specimens with leukemia, equally tasty and safe to consume. It is not a cancer that arises in each individual, but cancer cells from the same remote tumor that have been jumping from cockle to cockle through the sea for thousands of years. Tubío, from the University of Santiago de Compostela, believes that this phenomenon can help understand metastases, responsible for 90% of deaths by cancer in people.
