The parents of an Indian infant girl born with two faces say she is eating and breathing normally despite having two pairs of eyes and lips and two noses.
The baby, who is yet to be named, was born to factory worker Vinod Kumar and his wife Sushma three weeks ago in northern India and has been drawing a stream of curious observers and others who consider her a deity in this deeply religious Hindu-majority country.
“I had never seen something like this in my life so naturally I was a little scared when I first saw her,” her father said at the weekend at the family’s mud-and-brick house in Noida town, about 50 kilometres northeast of New Delhi.
The girl has found easy acceptance in Kumar’s large, extended family, who say they have no plans to consult doctors to check if the girl can receive treatment or corrective surgery.
“The doctor said everything is normal when she was born. So where’s the need to get medical help?” said the child’s father.
“She’s fed through one mouth and sucks her thumb with the other. We use whichever mouth is free to feed her,” the 24-year-old Kumar told AFP, adding that she is eating and breathing normally.
Doctors said it was an extremely rare case, with the girl having two skulls joined together, and that separating them was out of the question.
“Since the heads are fused, separating them is not possible,” paediatrician DK Gupta of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences told the Hindustan Times newspaper on the weekend.