Life

A team of Peruvian doctors successfully removed a "parasitic twin" from the stomach of a 3-year-old boy on Monday.

Dr. Carlos Astocondor of the medical team at Las Mercedes Hospital, in the northern port of Chiclayo, said the condition occurs in about one of every 500,000 live births.

He said the partially formed foetus weighs more than a kilogram and is 25 centimetres long.

According to Astocondor, "everything was smooth" and the prognosis is "good", after surgery complicated by the fact that the foetus was attached to the boy's liver and kidney - requiring the help of a cardio-vascular surgeon.

Astocondo explained that the brain, heart, lungs and intestines never developed after the foetus was absorbed by the other foetus inside the mother's womb.

The boy's parents said that he had complained of abdominal pains for some time but doctors in the Loreto region of the Peruvian Amazon had not noticed anything.

Only when the boy's father took him to the city of Chiclayo did paediatricians there detect the "parasitic twin" - also known as a "fetus in fetu".