天生4手4腳女童-塔特瑪

Many-limbed India girl in surgery

Lakshmi with her mother before the operation Surgeon Sharan Patil

Doctors in India operating on a two-year-old child who was born with four arms and four legs say that the surgery is going well.

Lakshmi Tatma is joined at the pelvis to what is, in effect, a headless, undeveloped twin.

A team of surgeons in the southern city of Bangalore is working in shifts to separate Lakshmi's spinal column and kidney from that of her twin.

It is hoped the procedure will allow her to survive beyond adolescence.

"It has been so far so good," hospital spokesman Siva Rudrayya told reporters.

"She is responding well, although there were a lot of complications. Doctors believe she has an 80% chance of survival," he said.

'Appalling'

The doctor leading the operation, Sharan Patil, told the BBC's World Today programme that his team is prepared for 40 hours of continuous surgery.

"However if everything goes smoothly it will finish much quicker," he said.
Dr Patil said he heard about "this little girl in the state of Bihar that she needed particular help and I did reach out and went to this small village near the border with Nepal.

"It was appalling to find her with an infected sore and suffering from continuous fever without any medical help."

Dr Patil added that the girl's parents were eager for the operation to be performed.
"The villagers and some of the relations were not so keen about going ahead with the surgery but the parents are looking to the future and they were very, very keen and motivated to have medical intervention," he said.
The child has been hailed by some in her village in the northern state of Bihar as the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi.
Conjoined twins are rare, occurring in about one in every 200,000 births.
They originate from a single fertilised egg, so they are always identical and of the same sex.
The overall survival rate of conjoined twins is somewhere between 5% and 25%.
Historical records over the past 500 years detail about 600 surviving sets of conjoined twins - more than 70% of which have been female twins.

印度四手四腳女孩開始接受４０小時手術

2007/11/06, 週二

班加羅爾30多名醫生於今天（11月6日）為一名天生有4條胳膊和4條腿的印度女孩，進行長達40小時的高難度手術，以讓她過上正常的童年生活。據BBC報道，手術已經開始，但暫時尚在初段，未知能否成功。 今年2歲的拉克什米．塔特瑪（Lakshmi Tatma）出生在印度比哈爾邦一個貧窮的農村家庭。她一生下來就有4條胳膊和4條腿，父母認為她是“上天送來的”，她的名字正就是印度教傳說中的財富女神。不少人都好奇地排隊來看她，還把她當神朝拜。 拉克什米的身體之所以如此特殊，是因為她的身上寄生了一個“雙胞胎妹妹”。寄生雙胞胎之所以會出現，是因為雙胞胎胚胎在子宮中分裂時，其中一個胚胎停止發育，成為另一個發育健康的胚胎的一部分。 拉克什米的這個“雙胞胎妹妹”寄生體同樣沒有發育完全，甚至連頭都沒有長出。它和拉克什米的身體在骨盆處融合在了一起。如果小女孩不接受手術的話，將很難活到12歲。為了進行這場高難度的手術，醫生們已經進行了長達兩個月的準備。