Mermaid girl faces series of operations to separate fused legs

[emad]

Times
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor



http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,177079,00.jpg
A PERUVIAN baby nicknamed “the Little Mermaid” because she was born with her legs fused together faces surgery this month to separate them.

If it succeeds, Milagros Cerrón will be only the second child with sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome, to have been able to lead a normal life. Those with the rare condition, which occurs in around one in 50,000 births, seldom live more than 24 hours because of defects in their internal organs.

But Milagros, whose name means miracles, was an exception. She has normal internal organs, though only a single kidney. Her legs have separate bones, cartilege and blood supply fused together within a tail-like structure, and two feet that emerge like flippers, heightening the similarity to a mermaid.

At nine months, says her surgeon Luis Rubio: “She has her own personality. Her relation to her surroundings is good. She babbles words. She is enchanting and is a wonderful joy.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1470653,00.html

[ET Awful]

1. Cool, hopefully all will go well with the surgery. But, I have to ask . .

is it just me, or does 1 in 50,000 actually seem like pretty high rate for such a defect?

[NV Whino]

2. Same thought occured to me n/t

[SheilaT]

3. I did a google search

for sirenomelia, (how I love google!) and learned that's its occurrence is more like one in 60,000 to 100,000 births. Most of the time, as the original piece indicates, the babies are so severely deformed they simply don't live. I wouldn't be surprised, from viewing the photos of some of them, that many simply don't make it full term, and are late miscarriages.

Here's a link to an article about a young woman in the U.S. who is the only known survivor (at the time the article was written) of this condition:
http://www.shrinershq.org/patients/tiffany7-01.html