India surgery on many-limbed girl

Lakshmi is named after the Hindu goddess of wealth

Doctors in India are attempting rare surgery to give a chance of a normal life to a two-year-old child who was born with four arms and four legs.

Lakshmi Tatma is joined at the pelvis to what is, in effect, a headless, undeveloped twin.

A team of surgeons in the southern city of Bangalore will be working in shifts to separate Lakshmi's spinal column and kidney from that of her twin.

It is hoped the procedure will allow her to survive beyond adolescence.

"We have just about started the surgery, opened the abdomen so it's very early days yet," the doctor leading the operation, Sharan Patil, told the BBC's World Today programme.

'Appalling'

"We have prepared ourselves for 40 hours of continuous surgery, however if everything goes smoothly it will finish much quicker," he said.

Dr Patil said he heard about "this little girl in the state of Bihar that she needed particular help and I did reach out and went to this small village near the border with Nepal.

"It was appalling to find her with an infected sore and suffering from continuous fever without any medical help."

Dr Patil added that the girl's parents were eager for the operation to be performed.

"The villagers and some of the relations were not so keen about going ahead with the surgery but the parents are looking to the future and they were very, very keen and motivated to have medical intervention," he said.

The child has been hailed by some in her village in the northern state of Bihar as the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi.

Conjoined twins are rare, occurring in about one in every 200,000 births.

They originate from a single fertilised egg, so they are always identical and of the same sex.

The overall survival rate of conjoined twins is somewhere between 5% and 25%.

Historical records over the past 500 years detail about 600 surviving sets of conjoined twins - more than 70% of which have been female twins.