A bizarre case report has revealed that three people who received an organ transplant from the same donor had died due to breast cancer. The donor was a 53-year-old woman who died of a heart attack in 2007. She had donated her heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys to patients needing implants. However, within six years after the organs were transplanted, three of four recipients had died, suggests a shocking report. The donor died of sepsis; however, the other three were diagnosed with breast cancer, which spread into their healthy organs killing them all. The doctors failed to notice cancer before the woman’s organs were donated. The organs acted as the Trojan horses that carried diseases into the women’s bodies. According to the health professionals, the chances of getting cancer from a donated organ could be as small as one in 10,000. The doctors said that this is the first time they have seen a case like this. This is the first time a donor has passed cancer on to three recipients and it has never been seen to take so long for cancer to develop. Scientists from VU University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Tübingen in Germany revealed the strange case of medical anomaly that unfolded six years after the donor died. They said that the donor screenings work well enough and there is only a 0.01%-0.05% chance of a recipient getting cancer from a donated organ. A 42-year-old woman was the first person to be diagnosed with the abnormal case. She received both the donor’s lungs. Merely a year after the transplant, the woman was admitted to the hospital, as her transplanted lungs weren’t working properly. After diagnosing, the doctors discovered that the woman had breast cancer that stranded in her lungs and spread to her bones. The tumor later spread to her liver and unfortunately the woman died in 2009. By doing DNA testing, the doctors found out that cancer had originated in the donor organ. The disease is still called breast cancer as the cells that damaged the liver of the woman were originally breast cancer cells. After the woman had died, the other recipients were warned. They underwent several diagnoses but no sign of cancer was seen. But the 32-year-old man who received the donor’s right kidney was diagnosed with cancer in his kidneys in 2011 and the other recipient, a 62-year-old woman found to have cancer in her liver. But they both died a year later. The findings of this particular medical case issued in the American Journal of Transplantation. Source
