Medicine: A Contagious Cancer?

At first it sounded like a macabre coincidence. Within three days in March 1983, two California cousins learned from their doctors that they had non- Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. One month earlier, a sister-in-law of one of them, living in Washington, had received the same diagnosis. The family was stunned. What could be causing their unbelievable misfortune?

In Georgia, a few months later, when the married daughter of one of the victims discovered that she too had the malignancy, the family could not avoid what had earlier seemed an illogical, incredible conclusion: four of them had "caught"...

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