'Unusual' cancers emerged after the pandemic. Doctors ask if covid is to blame.
Ariana Eunjung Cha
Fri, June 7, 2024 at 9:48 AM EDT
ROCK HILL, S.C. -Kashyap Patellooked forward to his team’s Friday lunches. All the doctors from his oncology practice would gather in the open-air courtyard under the shadow of a tall magnolia tree and catch up. The atmosphere tended to the lighthearted and optimistic. But that week, he was distressed.
It was 2021, a year into the coronavirus pandemic, and as he slid into a chair, Patel shared that he’d just seen a patient in his 40s with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and lethal cancer of the bile ducts that typically strikes people in their 70s and 80s. Initially, there was silence, and then one colleague after another said they’d recently treated patients who had similar diagnoses. Within a year of that meeting, the office had recorded seven such cases.
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“I’ve been in practice 23 years and have never seen anything like this,” Patel, CEO of Carolina Blood and Cancer Care Associates, later recalled. Asutosh Gor, another oncologist, agreed: “We were all shaken.”
There was other weirdness, too: multiple patients contending with multiple types of cancer arising almost simultaneously, and more than a dozen new cases of other rare cancers.
Increasingly, Patel was left with an unsettling thought: Could the coronavirus be inflaming the embers of cancer?
The uptick in aggressive, late-stage cancers since the dawn of the pandemic is confirmed by some early national data and a number of large cancer institutions. Many experts have mostly dismissed the trend as an expected consequence of disruptions to health care that began in 2020.
But not everyone.
The idea that some viruses can cause or accelerate cancer is hardly new. Scientists have recognized this possibility since the 1960s, and today, researchers estimate 15 to 20 percent of all cancers worldwide originate from infectious agents such as HPV, Epstein-Barr and hepatitis B.
It will probably be many years before the world has conclusive answers about whether the coronavirus is complicit in the surge of cancer cases, but Patel and other concerned scientists are calling on the U.S. government to make this question a priority knowing it could affect treatment and management of millions of cancer patients for decades to come.
“We are completely under-investigating this virus,” said Douglas C. Wallace, a University of Pennsylvania geneticist and evolutionary biologist. “The effects of repeatedly getting this throughout our lives is going to be much more significant than people are thinking.”
But there is no real world data linking SARS-CoV-2 to cancer, and some scientists remain skeptical.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/unusual-cancers-emerged-pandemic-doctors-134826164.html
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