Four People Get Cancer From One Donor’s Organs

Four patients developed breast cancer—and three of them died—after they all received organs from one donor, European researchers report. Doctors didn’t know that the donor had a malignancy at the time of death and the kidneys, lungs, liver, and heart were harvested to help others. The patients became ill years after their transplants. Three of the four died after the cancer metastasized and the fourth only survived after the removal of the donated right kidney. Frederike Bemelman, professor of nephrology at the University of Amsterdam and author of a report into the error, said it was an “extremely rare” case, and that there’s always “a small risk” of something going wrong during a medical procedure. The donor died of a stroke in 2007. Graham Lord, professor of medicine and honorary consultant in nephrology at King’s College London, said the donor’s cancer was “essentially an undetectable malignancy at the time of donation.”