A 26-year-old woman stunned doctors at a public hospital here on Saturday after she gave birth to a ‘mermaid baby’, born with its limbs fused. The condition is said to be rare, occurring once in a lakh births.
The woman, identified by doctors only as Suvarna from Shadnagar, underwent a C-section at Government Maternity Hospital at Petlaburj in the morning. She gave birth to twins, a girl weighing around 2.4 kg and the other around 1.2 kg, whose gender the doctors could not tell as the baby’s lower half was merged in a tail-like structure. The condition, Sirenomelia, warrants immediate attention as it can be fatal for the newborn.
Doctors at Petlaburj said the woman gave birth at 38 weeks. “The anomaly was not visible in the TIFFA scan. It’s a rare occurrence and we have not seen this kind of a birth before. The newborn was immediately rushed to Niloufer Hospital,” said S. Nagamani, the maternity hospital superintendent. A TIFFA scan is done around 20 weeks into pregnancy to determine fetal abnormalities.
At Niloufer Hospital, the State’s tertiary centre of care for newborn, doctors have dealt with such cases in the past. K. Ramesh Reddy, Director of Medical Education in Telangana and former head of Paediatric Surgery Department at Niloufer Hospital, said the baby born on Saturday has only one fully-formed limb. “The anal and the duodenal openings are not there. The urethra is also absent. In such cases, a diversion has to be put in place for bowel movement and urine,” he said. Prof. Reddy has seen three mermaid babies in the past. He said Sirenomelia causes still births in many instances, and in case of a live birth, a newborn’s odds of survival, even after surgical intervention, are small, he added. Doctors at Niloufer Hospital were evaluating the baby’s health until late on Saturday in an effort to stabilise the newborn and prepare the baby for possible interventions on Monday.
