How a simple infection can trigger cancer

AFRICA has a particularly high rate of cancers caused by infection. That’s the bad news. The good news is, they are - in theory - preventable using vaccines.More than half a century ago, an Irish physician named Denis Burkitt moved to Uganda and opened a medical clinic. He was quickly struck by the large number of children with facial swellings that often grew large enough to choke and kill. It was a type of cancer he had never seen back home.The cancer came to be called Burkitt’s lymphoma. Today, on the paediatric ward at the Uganda Cancer Institute, the beds are filled with children with Burkitt’s. It’s the most common childhood cancer in central Africa, and it starts with an infection. “It’s associated with a virus called Epstein-Barr,” says Dr Abrahams Omoding, an oncologist at the institute.