Tragic ‘mermaid baby’ born with fused lower body and no genitals

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

A baby in Tanzania was born with his lower body fused like a “mermaid” in an ultra rare case.

The newborn, who weighed just over 4.5 pounds, lacked an arm or anal opening and also had ambiguous genitalia, making it difficult to assign a gender. The infant only lived about five minutes.

Doctors made the diagnosis of sirenomelia, or “mermaid syndrome,” which has only been recorded a few times.

The case was reported earlier this month in an American medical journal.

Click here to resize this module

Sirenomelia is almost always fatal, with only 1% of affected infants surviving more than a week after birth.

Doctors treating the baby called the disease “incompatible” with life due to “multiple defects in critical systems.”

The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) states that the cause of sirenomelia is unclear and most cases occur randomly.

It is believed that the tissues do not grow or separate properly in the uterus, causing the lower extremities to fuse together.

The newborn’s mother, aged 22 and with no other children, was a rural farmer who had attended only two antenatal visits.

She had no underlying health conditions and tested negative for syphilis and HIV.

The mother reported no history of smoking, alcohol, drug abuse, or pesticide exposure.

However, she regularly used fertilizers due to her work as a farmer, which could have exposed the baby to harmful toxins, doctors noted.

Doctors did not perform any x-rays or post-mortem examinations “due to cultural taboos and restrictions on handling the deceased.” There was no laboratory capacity for genetic testing.

Very few cases of sironomelia have been reported in the medical literature.

One of the most famous is that of Milagros Cerron, a young Peruvian girl nicknamed the “Little Mermaid” after her birth in 2004.

Despite only having one kidney, she not only beat the odds to survive after birth, but she also thrived after her legs were separated as a baby. However, she died in 2019 at the age of 15 while waiting for a kidney transplant.

The case report was published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.