A woman stunned doctors when she gave birth to a baby with four legs, four arms and two faces in one-of-a-kind phenomenon. The child which was born in India has reportedly died.
According to reports, the baby’s mother, 38-year-old Rama Devi, was rushed to a rural hospital when she started experiencing labor pains.
However, hospital staff and villagers were shocked to find that the child was born conjoined with another body that had not fully developed.
This had caused the child to come out with two sets of faces, legs, and arms.
It appears that the underdeveloped legs and arms were protruding out from the child’s chest.
The child died five hours after birth.
The condition is so rare that doctors do not have a name for it.
It’s unclear how exactly the child died, though the baby was unable to breastfeed or consume milk on its own.
Upon seeing the baby’s unusual appearance, hospital staff reacted with fear and quickly moved the infant outside, sparking a chaos within the hospital. However, Ramphal, Ms Devi’s husband, expressed amazement at the birth of their unique child.
Though the delivery was straightforward and did not have complications, it occurred in a rural region where women hardly undergo prenatal screening, which could explain why the child’s condition was a surprise.
The family is believed to have other children.
Though it’s unclear if this exact condition has been seen before, several other incredibly rare forms of conjoined twins have been reported in India and surrounding countries.
Last November, a 30-year-old woman in India gave birth to a baby boy with four hands and four legs.
In Indonesia, twin toddlers were born joined at the pelvis, leaving them with three legs, four arms, and one penis and dubbed ‘spider twins.’
And two out of every 1million children worldwide are born with diprosopus, a rare form of conjoined twins in which all or parts of a face are duplicated. In these cases, the faces and brains are connected only with one brain stem.
In general, conjoined twins account for one in 50,000 to 200,000 live births and occur when a single fertilized egg splits and develops into two individuals.
About eight to 12 days after being conceived, the layers that split to form identical twins develop into specific organs and structures, according to the Mayo Clinic.
It is believed that the process ends prematurely, resulting in conjoined twins.
However, another theory suggests that two separate embryos fuse together early in development.
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