An Indian mother has given birth to a baby boy with four legs and four arms.
The new-born, has already become the centre of attraction in Baruipur village in West Bengal. Family members and locals believed that he was a reincarnation of Hindu God Brahma. People from different part of the state have been flooding to the hospital to get a closer look at their "God Boy", The Daily Mail reported.
"When he first came out we couldn't believe it," a relative told Express UK. "The nurses said he was badly deformed but I could see that this was a sign from God. In fact, this is a miracle, it's God's baby. Indian God's have extra limbs just like this."
However, according to the doctors, the extra limbs were the result of a premature conjoined twin.
Conjoined twins are formed when a woman releases a single egg that fails to separate completely after fertilisation. Though the embryo starts splitting into two, the process stops in the middle, and the partial separation results in conjoined twins.
Though there have been separate reports of conjoined twins from different parts of the world, conjoined twins are very rare - one out of 2,00,000 live births- and have very few chances of survival -between 5 and 25%, according to the health experts from the University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore in the US.
A similar case has been reported earlier in Pakistan. In April 2012, a team of doctors from the National Institute of Child Health (NICH) in Karachi operated a six-legged baby born in Sukkur, Pakistan and successfully removed the extra limbs and saved the baby.
In May this year, a Sydney-based couple Renee Young and Simon Howie welcomed their twin girls named Hope and Faith, who share the same body, but separate brains and faces. However, the girls survived only 19 days after their birth.
India has witnessed similar cases in the past. In March, a couple in Haryana Subhash and Urmila- welcomed their conjoined twins who had two heads and one body.
Another living example of the conjoined twins is 18-year-old Sabah and Farah from Bihar.
