A young boy in India who complained of stomach pains was discovered to have a fetus inside his abdomen.
The 4-year-old from West Bengal was taken to the hospital after suffering severe stomach aches, the International Business Times reported. Doctors suspected that he had a tumor, but the ultrasound and CT scan they performed turned up something unexpected: a developed, but dead, fetus.
"The dead embryo which had hands, legs, nails and a partially formed head was removed from the child's body after a long operation," Dr. Shirshendu Giri, head of the team of doctors who treated him, told IBT. "The boy is all right now still under close observation."
The child had experienced a very rare medical condition known as "fetus in fetu," or "baby within a baby," which occurs in just one in every 500,000 people, according to a study in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences. The condition can occur during the early stages of a twin pregnancy, when one fetus wraps around the other. The enveloped fetus then becomes a parasite, feeding off of its host twin as long as it can survive.
Two similar cases arose in South Asia in recent years, IBT reported. In 1999, an Indian man underwent an operation after carrying a parasitic twin inside his body for 36 years. And in 2006, doctors in Pakistan reportedly removed two fetuses from a 2-month-old baby girl.
