A cancer-sufferer has been denied access to her money after chemo erased her fingerprints.
Nausea, vomiting, fatigue, hair loss, ulcers…
The physical side-effects of chemotherapy are all too well-known. Whether it’s from personal experience, anecdotes or what we’ve seen or read about in movies and books, most people could at least rattle off the basics.
But there is one lesser-known side effect causing a whole new raft of social problems for cancer sufferers and survivors – the obliteration of fingerprints.
A 65-year-old woman was recently turned away at a bank in Mexico City because it required her fingerprint to authorise a transaction. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the woman’s fingerprints had been erased by the chemotherapy drug she was taking to fight her stage-four breast cancer.
Related: “Since the cancer diagnosis, the old me has been forgotten.”
The woman suffered from a rare side-effect known as hand-foot syndrome (or palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia). It causes redness, swelling, pain and blisters on the palms of hands and soles of feet, which can distort or erase unique fingerprints.
The woman was given a letter by doctors to explain in the future her lack of fingerprints.
But similar cases have been reported of people already suffering from ill health being further frustrated and inconvenienced by the condition.
In the United States, immigration officials detained a 62-year-old Singaporean cancer sufferer for four hours after he was unable to provide fingerprints.
And in Saudi Arabia, a 53-year-old man suffering from terminal cancer was unable to process important government documents due to his lack of fingerprints.
Initially used for crime fighting purposes, the mass marketing of fingerprint analysis technology has exploded in recent years, with personal computers and smartphones proving an extra layer of identity security for users.
The increasingly-relied upon technology is based on the assumption that everybody has unique fingerprints.
Top Comments
It's uncommon and the oncology drs and chemo nurses monitor side effects such as hand and foot syndrome each cycle of treatment +/- adjust dose accordingly. The risk varies depending on the type of treatment given and the dose. The top photo supplied is a severe case.. I suspect it wasn't picked up between cycles in it's early stages or this lady mentioned was just incredibly incredibly unlucky! There is a lot of hype in the media about cancer treatments and side effects lately.. it would be nice if occasionally I saw an article in the media discussing how beneficial chemo treatment can be for patients (yes I know it can also be horrible and sometimes it doesn't cure pts AND sometimes it can also be pretty utterly useless and we need to talk about that BUT it can also be very well tolerated and give amazing relief to pts suffering from this horrible disease - no I ain't getting paid by the big pharma for that comment either lol). I feel terrible for these women, hopefully their hands are well and truly on the mend. If you have any concerns regarding cancer treatments, you should discuss this with your doctor/treating team.