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SCIENTISTS have said strong evidence was emerging that the catastrophic Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease should be regarded as a parasite. The disease, which has wiped out 80 per cent of the devil population in the wild, has been treated as a transmissible cancer. But immunologist Greg Woods, of the Menzies Institute, said it also showed many classic parasitical characteristics. ``It's a cancer and a parasite,'' he said before delivering his findings to the Australian Society for Parasitology's conference in Launceston. ``It goes from host to host and using each host to survive, and it will damage its host and move on to the next host so it's behaving like what we classically regard as being a parasite.'' Also like a bona fide parasite, it uses the host's natural behaviour to spread itself, in this case the devil's insatiable appetite for violence, he said. ``You drink water so you pick up a parasite,'' associate professor Woods said. ``With the devil, the tumour gets on the teeth and devils bite each other.'' Its parasitic behaviour made the tumour disease fundamentally different from the form of cancer that humans contracted, associate professor Woods said. ``The thing about the cancer that us humans get is that once the human dies or recovers the cancer dies as well, whereas this tumour goes from host to host,'' he said.

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