A 22-year-old woman has given birth to conjoined twins in Kerala's Malappuram district and the babies are under paediatric observation.
The infants, born at the Government General Hospital at Manjery near here on Friday, have their abdomen and pelvic regions joined together.
The babies and their mother have been shifted to the Medical College Hospital at Kozhikode for their care by experts.
According to Dr S Prathap, paediatric surgeon at the Kozhikode Medical College, this condition is known in medical parlance as "omphalo ischio pageus", which denotes joining together of abdomen and pelvic regions of the twins.
"This a rare phenomenon...Occurs once in a lakh deliveries or so", Dr Prathap, who heads the medical team attending to the twins, told PTI.
He said the doctors have to scan each organ of the babies before attempting their separation and it is too early to say whether they could be saved.
One of the infants is a girl while the genetic part of the other is sealed off, he said.
"We have to examine each organ of the pair. In the present case one of the pair has heart ailments. Only after a thorough examination and scanning, we would be in a position to say that if at least one of the twins could be saved through a separation procedure," Prathap said.
A pair of Siamese twins were born in Kerala in 2005 at Pariyaram Medical College but they died within a few days.
