The Daily Express reported on April 13 that cancer patients have “observed tumors disappearing” after being infected with a common virus.
According to the report, a paper published in the British Journal of Haematology shows that a 61-year-old man with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Cornwall lost his tumor to a new form of coronary pneumonia. The man was given oxygen to help him breathe while his lungs recovered and made a full recovery after 11 days in the hospital, and a cancer scan a week after his discharge showed that the tumors in his body had almost disappeared.
Doctors believe that COVID-19 triggered an anti-tumor immune response in the patient’s body and helped to eradicate the cancer, which would have gone into spontaneous remission, just at a very low rate.
While the immune system clears the coronavirus by releasing large numbers of infection-fighting cells (called T cells), it also attacks the cancer cells that it considers “foreign. Tumors often evade the immune system, and in this case, the neo-coronavirus infection seems to have activated the immune system quite effectively.
The patient’s case may be a coincidence, and medical experts believe more research is needed; researchers have not fully uncovered the mechanism by which COVID-19 eradicates cancer, but the most likely cause is a partial immune response.
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