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The rare chemo side-effect making identification impossible.

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.

Fingerprints – impossible to remove unless you suffer from a rare side-effect of chemo treatment. Image via Twitter.

 

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.

Hand-foot syndrome causes redness, swelling and erases fingerprints. Image via Twitter.

 

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.

Many phones use fingerprint technology for security. Image via Twitter.

 

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.