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Two-Faced Humans (Craniofacial Duplication; Diprosopus)

IvanVolle

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Baby with two faces worshiped as goddess

"A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated -- she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

"My daughter is fine -- like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker."


link with video:
edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiap ... index.html
Link is dead. The full article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2008041...pcf/04/08/baby.heads.ap/index.html#cnnSTCText

The archived version of the CNN article does not include a photo. The photo below was retrieved from an archived ABC News article on Lali (at the Wayback Machine).


LaliSingh.jpg

SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20080626032756/http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4549608&page=1
 
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I'm very curious as to her health all ways around. I mean, where she lives is so rural. Will she have more extensive tests done to see if her internal organs are functioning properly? How does craniofacial duplication affect her brain? Apparently, the parents aren't letting docs examine her.

How common is this (esp in a live birth)?

I just love the dimple.
 
As of 2008 Lali Singh was suspected to be the only known living (i.e., not stillborn) example of complete facial duplication. Her parents declined to allow her to be examined in any detail (e.g., with CT / MRI scans). Lali's condition deteriorated, and she died of a heart attack two months after birth. For more details see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprosopus#Lali_Singh
 
In May 2014 Faith and Hope Howie were born in Australia. They exhibited complete craniofacial duplication and survived for 19 days.
Faith Daisy and Hope Alice Howie (8 May – 27 May 2014) were born in Sydney, Australia, to parents Simon Howie and Renee Young. Faith and Hope shared one body and skull, but had complete duplication of the facial features, as well as duplication of the brain; both brains joined to one brain stem. Young and Howie had learned at nineteen weeks gestation of their children's condition, but opted not to terminate the pregnancy. The children were born six weeks prematurely and appeared to be doing well, able to breathe unaided several days after their birth, and they were observed to sleep and cry at different times. They died nineteen days following their birth due to unknown causes, although some sources indicated that the girls died following an operation for unknown reasons.

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprosopus#Faith_and_Hope_Howie

Here are three news articles (2 salvaged from the Wayback Machine) covering the Howie case:

http://www.myjoyonline.com/news/201...rls-who-share-a-body-but-have-two-brains.php?

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...personalities-say-parents-20140519-38ix2.html

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/mobi...and-head-die-almost-three-weeks-after-surgery
 
That's Janus though, he's allowed.

I've always found it interesting that, in some religions, an obvious physical or indeed mental disability was indicative of being touched by the divine. In others though, it was some sort of punishment for sins committed in a previous life. Remember Glen Hoddle? A great football manager, but he was eviscerated by the press for expressing his New-Age beliefs about disability and reincarnation.
 
I've always found it interesting that, in some religions, an obvious physical or indeed mental disability was indicative of being touched by the divine. In others though, it was some sort of punishment for sins committed in a previous life. Remember Glen Hoddle? A great football manager, but he was eviscerated by the press for expressing his New-Age beliefs about disability and reincarnation.

Yup, it all depends on the culture.
Can remember for example learning in Health Studies that some cultures accept the hearing of voices as the process of receiving guidance from one's ancestors. If someone from that culture who moves to a Western country were to disclose when this happened to them they'd be assumed to have mental health problems.
 
Here's a new - and (thankfully ... ) relatively minor case of diprosopus. A mass first detected on a fetal girl's face in prenatal scans turned out to be a second mouth.
This Rare Condition Caused a Baby to Be Born With a Second Mouth

Countless biological processes are involved in growing a mini human, and sometimes parts of this complex life's miracle can go awry. So we scan and test babies as they develop to prepare for anything out of the ordinary... although the growth of a second mouth isn't usually on the cards.

During one such scan of a baby in its third trimester, doctors detected an unusual mass to the right of the baby's mouth. (Warning: slightly graphic photo ahead.)

But the prenatal ultrasonography did not allow the team to resolve what exactly they were looking at. Possibilities included a cyst, fibrous dysplasia or a teratoma, which can occur when one twin absorbs another during development.

Once the girl was born, it became apparent the mass was actually a small second mouth. It had its own lip, cavity, teeth and a tiny little tongue that moved in synchrony with her main tongue as she fed. ...

Luckily for this baby girl, the extra oral cavity did not appear to cause any problems with her breathing or ability to feed. It did not even connect to her central mouth, which appeared to function normally.

Diprosopus - the duplication of head and/or facial structures - is a very rare condition, with only around 35 cases on record in humans since 1900. At its extreme, this condition can lead to a full facial duplication, like this example in a cat. But when it comes to duplications involving just one area of the face, it's usually the mouth parts that are involved.

"Our patient's craniofacial duplication is a rare case that presented as an isolated anomaly, with no associated syndromes or abnormalities."

This allowed the doctors to perform surgery to remove the extra month when the girl was just six months old. In total, they removed some muscle, bone, mouth mucous membrane and oesophagus tissue, as well as a salivary gland and six unerupted teeth, all while carefully trying to preserve her facial nerves.

Other than some swelling at the surgical site, which resolved after several months, the patient healed well and required no further treatment. The doctors noted she has trouble relaxing the right part of her lower lip, possibly due to some missing nerves. ...

FULL STORY (With Photos):
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-rare-condition-caused-a-baby-to-be-born-with-a-second-mouth

PUBLISHED CASE REPORT:
https://casereports.bmj.com/content/13/5/e233799
 
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