• Question: is it true that they inject cancer into you so you don't get cancer?

    Asked by cawthornerosa to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 14 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 13 Nov 2011:

      There are many diseases that injecting a small amount of the bugs (a virus or bacteria) into the blood helps prevent future illness. These are specially modified bugs so you don’t actually get sick, either they are less harmful or they are dead so cannot actually cause an infection, but their presence prompts the body to produce special blood cells to kill them.

      Once the body makes these blood cells once it can do it again more quickly if you ever get exposed to the real bugs. Smallpox is one disease that has been completely got rid of in many countries by this method – quite an achievement!

      Unfortunately how cancer works in the body is very different. It is caused by a problem with cells in an organ beginning to multiply very quickly. How this happens originally and how the body responds is a very complex problem, one that many scientists are working on all the time.

      There may be some recent discovery I am not aware of though, so you could be right (I’m not a medic!)

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I agree with Andrew.

      When you inject a small amount of a bug into your system, it allows your immune system to learn what those foreign cells are, so they’re ready to defend against them if they come again.

      The problem with cancerous cells is that they are your own cells (they’re just not working properly). If your immune system learnt to kill them it would be learning to kill all of your cells!

      So I doubt that this could be done with cancer.

    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      There are vaccines now available that make it much less likely for you to get certain specific types of cancer, those are the types of cancer that are associated with viruses.

      Cervical cancer is a type of cancer that in most cases seems to need the presence of a virus which they call ‘Human papillomavirus’ and they have made vaccines against some strains which cause about 70% of this type of cancer.

      These vaccines are essentially dead viruses which are injected into the body in order to allow the bodies own defence systems to practice killing it the virus safely. Then when the real virus comes along you’re body will be trained and will know how to kill the real thing.

      You can read more about this vaccination here:

      http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hpv-vaccination/pages/introduction.aspx?WT.mc_id=090805

      Thanks for the question 🙂
      Peta

      P.S. They are also working on a good virus that would help the body remove the dangerous cancer cells: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14730608

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