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Written By: Editorial Team | Updated : February 13, 2015 11:56 AM IST
In a modern day, where medical science is gearing up for every hurdle coming in the way for conception, there are some things even science finds difficult to explain. Once such news by Discovery News makes waves.
A baby born in Hong Kong was pregnant with her own siblings at the time of her birth, according to a new report of the infant's case. Research suggests that a baby's sense of smell may play a large role in how it acquires the ability to be afraid. All the child needs is a mom in distress. The baby's condition, known as fetus-in-fetu, is incredibly rare, occurring in only about 1 in every 500,000 births. It's not clear exactly why it happens. "Weird things happen early, early in the pregnancy that we just don't understand," said Dr. Draion Burch, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Pittsburgh, who goes by Dr. Drai. "This is one of those medical mysteries."
The World Health Organization considers a tiny fetus found within an infant to be a kind of teratoma, or tumor, rather than a normally developing fetus. But the doctors who treated the baby girl wrote that rather than a teratoma, the tiny fetuses may instead be the remains of sibling twins that were absorbed during the pregnancy.
The newborn baby was referred to Dr. Yu Kai-man, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong, because the baby was suspected to have a tumor, according to the case report. The mother's prenatal ultrasound had revealed an unusual mass within the infant, but it was unclear to the doctors exactly what the mass was. During surgery, which was done when the girl was about 3 weeks old, the surgeons discovered two fetuses between her liver and her kidney. One fetus weighed 0.3 ounces (9.3 grams) and the other 0.5 ounces (14.2 grams) corresponding to about 8 and 10 weeks' gestation, the case report said. Each of the babies had an umbilical cord that linked to a placenta-like mass in the girl's belly.
The baby girl was obviously too young to have conceived the fetuses herself. Instead, it's likely that the girl was once one of triplets, the researchers said. Then, for some mysterious reason, the two smaller fetuses were absorbed into the body of the remaining child.
Image source: Getty Images
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