Post by Laoupdate on Feb 3, 2005 0:26:47 GMT -5
LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - A Peruvian baby dubbed the "Little Mermaid" because she was born with a rare condition in which her legs are fused, will have surgery this month to try to separate them, doctors said.
Nine-month-old Milagros Cerron -- her name means miracles in Spanish -- is one of only a handful of the estimated 1-in-60,000 to 100,000 people born with sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome, to have lived more than a few hours, experts say.
For Luis Rubio, the doctor leading the Peruvian team that will cut her legs apart in Lima on Feb. 24, the past year has been a crash course in tackling a condition he had read about in textbooks but never expected to have to treat.
Doctors believe there may only be one other surviving "mermaid" -- 16-year-old American Tiffany Yorks, whose legs were separated when she was a few months old.
Experts say sirenomelia is about as rare as conjoined twins but is nearly always fatal because most sufferers lack kidneys or have other complications.
"It is very, very rare," said Prof. Pierpaolo Mastroiacovo, director of the Rome-based International Center of Birth Defects. "The presence of renal agenesis (absence or imperfect development) makes survival very rare and improbable."
From the waist up, Milagros smiles and babbles like any healthy infant. Below the waist, her stomach merges seamlessly into her legs, which are joined all the way to her heels.
With her tiny feet splayed in a 'V', the impression of a mermaid's forked tail is complete.
The bones of both legs are visible and move separately, "as if she wanted to get free of this sack," Rubio said.
He took on Milagros' case when she was two days old and is treating her in a City Hall-funded mobile "solidarity hospital" run out of old buses in a poor northern district of Lima.
Source: www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7516287
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