Reuters photo
Doctors today removed the undeveloped conjoined twin of Manar Maged, an Egyptian girl, who is held by a nurse. "The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said," reports Reuters.
Bizarre.
This from Reuters today:
BENHA, Egypt -- Egyptian doctors said they removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl suffering from one of the rarest birth defects in an operation [today].
Abla el-Alfy, a consultant in pediatric intensive care, told Reuters at the hospital in Benha, near Cairo, that Manar Maged was in a serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus -- a problem related to that of conjoined twins linked at the skull.
"We are still working on the baby. After surgery ... you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing," Alfy said. "We have some improvement."
As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.
Video footage provided by the hospital, a national center in Egypt for children's medicine, showed Manar smiling and at ease in a cot with the dark-haired "parasitic" twin, attached at the upper left side of the girl's skull, occasionally blinking.
After the 13-hour operation, Reuters journalists saw the baby, her head swathed in bandages and body wreathed by tubes, in an intensive care ward. A separate twin sister, Noora, is healthy after initial problems with the birth on March 30.
Alfy said the 13-strong surgical team separated Manar's brain from the conjoined organ in small stages, cutting off the blood supply to the extra head while preventing increased blood flow to Manar's heart, which would have risked cardiac arrest.
...The doctors decided not to carry out Manar's operation soon after her birth: "We studied the babies well," Alfy said. "We had to study how the blood supply of the parasite is working."
She plans to keep Manar in intensive care for up to 10 days and remains cautious: "Things are getting better but...at any time things can go wrong."
The condition occurs when an embryo begins to split into identical twins but fails to complete the process and one of the conjoined twins fails to develop fully in the womb.
The second twin can form as an extra limb, a complete second body lacking vital organs, or, in very rare cases, a head.
I have a problem with calling Manar's undeveloped conjoined twin a "parasite." Ticks and fleas are parasites. Tapeworms are parasites. Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, which are sucking in billions of our tax dollars for their bogus wars while the Bush regime slashes social programs, are parasites. Republicans, who don't want to pay any taxes but want the rest of us to pay for everything, are parasites.
Manar's undeveloped conjoined twin was not a "parasite," or just a "head," but was a victim of a goof of nature. While Manar's quality of life is greatly improved with the surgical removal of her undeveloped twin, I hope that her undeveloped twin was regarded, in her death after her removal from her fully developed twin sister, as a human being and not as a "parasite" or just a "head."
Update (Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005): Wow, is there interest in this story. I'm getting hundreds of hits from people looking for it via search engines.
Here are two more photos of Manar Maged taken before the separation surgery. The undated photos were released yesterday.
Associated Press photos
I'll probably get hate e-mail for saying this, but in the first photo, the undeveloped conjoined twin in the stocking reminds me of a Gloworm:
Anyway, Reuters reports today that Manar Maged is recovering well from the separation surgery. (I have to wonder if the undeveloped conjoined twin was ever named. If so, I haven't seen her name in any news story.)
6:29:18 PM 
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