3 die of breast cancer after receiving organs from same donor: report

FBN's Gerri Willis on a number of men who were at Ground Zero after 9/11 reporting breast cancer and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.

Three people died of breast cancer after catching the killer disease from the same donor, reports claim.

The female donor, 53, donated her kidneys, lungs, heart and liver to patients after dying from a stroke in 2007.

But, because doctors never picked up the cancerous cells in her vital organs, they acted as a deadly Trojan Horse.

Four of the five recipients died within six years, according to the American Journal of Transplantation.

Three of them passed away after picking up breast cancer, which then spread to their healthy organs.

And the heart patient died from sepsis, which occurs when the body attacks its own organs trying to deal with an infection.

Experts have said the odds of catching cancer from a single organ transplant are as little as one in 10,000.

This case was revealed by the University of Tübingen in Germany and VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

They said the first patient to fall ill from the transplant was a 42-year-old woman who received both lungs.

She died in 2009 after the cancer, which started in her lungs, spread to both her bones and liver.

Tests were immediately carried out on the woman, 62, who got the left kidney, and the man, 32, who got the right one.

While the man survived, the woman died two months after she was diagnosed with cancer of the liver in 2014.

The third patient to die from breast cancer was a woman, 59, who received a liver.

Her tumor was found in 2011 but she refused a new one and eventually died in 2014.

This story originally appeared on The Sun. Read more content from The Sun here.