Chinese doctors this week performed an operation that successfully removed extra limbs from a boy who was born with four arms and four legs. The newborn is now in a stable condition in a hospital in the southern China province of Guangdong and is feeling well.
The boy, who is currently 14 days old, was born with a headless twin who joined him.
According to the chief surgeon at Guangzhou Children's Medical Center, the babies were supposed to be twins, but one was underdeveloped and began to deform. The conjoined twins weighed just over three kilograms before the operation, in which a parasitic fetus weighing 600 grams was removed.
The child was diagnosed with pneumonia and congenital heart disease before surgery, which is not uncommon for children born in China, according to Mail Online.
His father, whose name is Chen, said that he had visited many hospitals near his home with his newborn son, but none of them could explain the reasons for the deformity. Chen says he blames himself for what happened. The man believes that taking better care of his wife during pregnancy could have prevented the deformity of the second fetus.
“I only worried about my work. I tried to earn money instead of taking my wife to the hospital for a medical examination,”said the man.
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In August last year, the media reported on an eight-month-old Indian baby undergoing surgery to remove a second head. According to the doctors, the second head was the "parasitic twin", which weighed almost a kilogram. The child, known as Tofajal, suffered from a rare disease called encephalomeningocele, affecting one in 40,000 to 45,000 children.
A similar incident happened to a child in Pakistan two years ago. The abnormal birth was the result of a genetic disease that affects only one infant in a million, according to a physician at the National Institute of Child Health in Karachi. Monozygous or identical twins are formed from one zygote (one egg fertilized by one sperm), which is divided into two (or more) parts during the cleavage stage. Xyphopagus or Siamese twins are formed when the cleavage stage does not occur completely.
