Lucknow, Jan. 6: Doctors in Varanasi have successfully extracted two foetuses from inside the abdomen of a two-month old infant, correcting a rare medical phenomenon that had never been reported in India until now.

A team led by paediatric surgeon Ajay Narayan Gangopadhyay at the Banaras Hindu University Institute of Medical Sciences yesterday removed the partially developed twin foetuses in a two-hour surgery on the infant from Ballia.

Both the foetuses were locked inside a sac filled with amniotic fluid wedged between the vertebral column and the stomach of the infant. Each foetus had a head with hair, a lower abdomen, limbs and male genitalia, but neither had a heart.

Doctors call this condition foetus-in-foetu, the result of a multiple pregnancy gone wrong. “This was a triplet pregnancy that ended up with one healthy baby with two foetus-in-foetu,” Gangopadhyay said.

Medical journals have catalogued about 90 cases of foetus-in-foetu from different countries since European doctors reported the first known cases in the early 19th century. In September 2008, Calcutta doctors had removed a foetus-in-foetu from a month-old baby at Belona Nursing Home in Mominpore. In 1999, Mumbai doctors extracted one from a 36-year-old man from Nagpur.

The infant operated in Varanasi yesterday was born last November and had been brought to the Varanasi hospital on Friday with symptoms of vomiting and irregular appetite. “We were at our wits’ end,” said Hemant Kumar, the child’s father.

Ultrasound and CT scans on the baby’s abdomen revealed the presence of the twins inside, Gangopadhyay said. The surgeons created a 20-cm-long incision on the baby’s abdomen and separated the baby’s organs from the sac holding the twin foetuses.

“This was the tricky part of the surgery. We had to find the blood vessel that was supplying blood into the sac and cut it off to pull the sac out,” Gangopadhyay said.

Once the sac and foetuses were out, the surgeons closed the abdomen.

“The baby is recuperating in an intensive care unit, but appears fine today,” Gangopadhyay said. “It was a major operation for the infant. We’re now feeding him intravenously, we hope to start normal feeding in two days.”

Although doctors are familiar with the rare condition, families are caught by surprise. “Is this a kind of curse or God’s anger on us?” asked the infant’s father Hemant, before he went to a temple in Varanasi to worship after doctors told him on Sunday about the twins inside his two-month-old son’s stomach.

The foetuses had to be removed because they could have posed the threat of gangrene if their tissues began to degenerate, a member of the surgical team said.