A Few Cancers Are Contagious

Columbia University researcher Michael Metzger has investigated a leukemia in clams that seems to come infect other clams and come from the clam cancer itself.  This would mean that a few cancers are contagious.  Such contagious cancers may be infecting clams as well as Tasmanian devils and dogs.  The link below has a comment that goes as follows:

You all missed another transmissible cancer which is a malignancy spread from Syrian hamster to Syrian hamster. The vector is the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The tumor is non-viral and is transmitted as a malignant cell explant. Reportedly, all the Syrian [golden] hamsters in captivity originated more than 100 years ago from a single pair. Therefore all of the domesticated hamsters are highly inbred and can apparently accept one another’s tissues and cells. Something similar apparently happened with Tasmanian Devils. I’m informed that genetic studies reveal that these marsupials passed through a tight genetic bottleneck in the not so distant past.

This can’t be true of the transmissible canine malignancies, though, because this cancer is transmissible to entirely separate canine species including wolves, coyotes, jackals and foxes. I’m unaware of transmissible cancers in cheetahs but they’d be animals to watch. I read somewhere that animals from different parts of Africa are so immunologically similar that they can accept tissue grafts from completely unrelated cheetahs.

     -- Ron, April 9, 2015

This is more than a little big scary, because hamsters and dogs are placental mammals, like human beings.

The above article and comment are both from this link:

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/09/selfish-shellfish-cells-cause-contagious-clam-cancer/