Dead foetus found inside boy who complained of stomach ache

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A four-year-old boy who had complained of a stomach ache turned out to have a foetus inside him.

The child, from a village in the Indian state of West Bengal, was taken to hospital last week after suffering from severe stomach pain, according to the International Business Times.

Doctors initially suspected that the boy had a tumour, but were shocked when scans revealed that there was a dead foetus within his abdomen.

The medical condition, referred to as foetus in foetu, or a ‘baby within a baby’, is extremely rare, with just one in every 500-600,000 reportedly suffering from it.

Dr Shirshemdu Giri, who led the team of doctors who operated on the boy, told IBN Live: “The dead embryo which had hands, legs, nails and a partially formed head was removed from the child’s body after a long operation. The boy is alright, now still under close observation.”

Foetus in foetu is an abnormality which occurs when a mass of tissue, resembling a foetus, forms inside the body.

The two main explanations for the occurrence are that the mass is a very highly differentiated form of a cyst, and that the ‘parasitic’ foetus was a twin of the now host twin.

Very early in a twin pregnancy, one foetus wraps around and envelops the other and the enveloped twin becomes a parasite, in that its survival depends on the survival of the host twin, by drawing on the host’s blood supply.