Chinese Boy Born With Twelve Fingers and Twelve Toes

Although not unheard of, the incidence of polydactylism, or being born with extra fingers and toes, doesn’t happen every day. The word derives from the ancient Greek (polus=many and daktulos=finger). Usually, the extra limbs are surgically removed. In the most unusual case of a baby boy born in China last year, a second penis was removed from his back shortly after birth.

A twelve-year-old boy named Ouyang Guangchun from Songpo village in southern China’s Hunan province was born with 12 fingers and 12 toes and has lived his life with all of his dactyls intact.  His parents have declined to permit the surgery because they feel the extra digits do not in any way interfere with their son’s quality of life or his ability to use his hands or feet.

The boy is the only member his family to be so afflicted with extra fingers and toes. While it is not unusual for children to be born with additional digits, it is not common for those extra digits to look and function normally, which they do in Ouyang’s case.

“If people don’t look at his hands or feet carefully, they can hardly tell anything, as the extra digits are growing naturally along with the others,” his mother told the press.

In a very odd twist of fate, some three months before the boy was born, a sow owned by his family gave birth to a piglet, which had eight legs, two mouths and four ears!

“The pig died two days later. It possibly was a bad omen to my family, leading to the birth of my son with extra fingers and toes,” added the mother.

Of course, there is no connection at all to the two events and it is just an extremely weird coincidence. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction and when dealing with mutations within the human and animal worlds, these anomalies have logical medical explanations and have nothing at all to do with superstition.

What do YOU think about this?

(Link)

By MDeeDubroff on 26-07-2010