Doctors bid to separate legs of 'mermaid' baby
A Peruvian medical team is preparing for a pioneering operation to separate the fused legs of a nine-month-old girl born with a rare condition known as sirenomelia, or “mermaid syndrome”.
Milagros Cerron, dubbed the “little mermaid” because her fused legs and separated feet resemble the tail of a fish, is one of only three people in the world known to have the strange condition.
A team of doctors will attempt the surgery on February 24 at one of Lima’s charity hospitals for the poor, lead surgeon Luis Rubio said today.
“This is a child that has her own personality,” he said in an interview. “Her relation to her surroundings is good. She babbles words. She is enchanting and is a wonderful joy.”
The girl was born in the mountain city of Huancayo, 125 miles east of Lima, to a family with limited financial resources.
Only one in 70,000 people are born with the condition and almost none survive more than seven days because of defects in their internal organs, Rubio said.
Although most of Milagros’s internal organs are fine, she was born with only one kidney and there is only a single channel for her digestive tract and genitals, he said.
Because her major organs will not be part of the operation, Rubio said he feels her chances of survival are good.
“Every surgical procedure has risks but we are taking every precaution,” he said.
A team including trauma surgeons, plastic surgeons, cardiovascular surgeons, neurologists, gynaecologists and a paediatrician will perform the surgery, which is expected to take five hours.
It will be conducted in stages beginning with the insertion of bags of silicone between her heels and knees to separate the tissue and provide enough skin to close the incision at the end of the operation.
The child will need future operations to rotate her feet forward and reconstruct her genitalia, Rubio said.
