Baby Born Without Skin Stuns Doctors In India

WARNING: This article contains graphic images of a newborn with a shocking skin condition.

In a country with more than 1 billion people, it’s almost impossible to imagine that two people with the same extremely rare gene mutation would meet and have a baby, but that’s exactly what happened to a couple of farmers in Wadi, India.

A baby girl stunned doctors when she was born at the Lata Mangeshkar Hospital with the extremely rare and life-threatening disorder Harlequin Ichthyosis, in which infants are born with very hard, thick skin covering most of their bodies and separated by deep cracks or fissures. Uncurable Harlequin disorder is believed to affect about 1 in every 300,000 newborns, but since the poor farmers couldn’t afford pre-birth treatment, there was no way to determine the baby’s health.

Delivery Doctor Yash Banait told the Mirror, “There is no skin on the body, so skin grafting is not a possibility. But the baby hasn’t developed any breathing problems lest she would have required to be kept on ventilation.” The horrifying images of the newborn show her internal organs were nearly visible and extremities barely developed.

The infant was born without eyes or ears and just two breathing holes for a nose. Although India’s first Harlequin baby was believed at first to live, the newborn passed away just two days after birth.

Dean of the hospital, Dr Kajal Mitra, told the Deccan Chronicle “The survival rate for a Harlequin baby is extremely bleak and the babies generally succumb within hours or days of birth. Our senior medical experts were observing the baby 24/7 and I had personally contacted my colleagues in the US and UK to constitute a line of treatment. But, considering that there is such little research done about the disease, and this particular case was an extreme variety of the disease, unfortunately the baby passed away at around 4.30 pm.”

The infant’s body has since been donated to NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences in hopes that she will be able to help save future babies suffering from this heartbreaking disorder.

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[Featured Image: Twitter/Punjab Update]

Baby Born Without Skin Stuns Doctors In India is an article from: LifeDaily