On Monday, a video of a baby born with “two heads” in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico began circulating the internet after relatives reportedly shared the footage on January 6. Central European News (CEN) eventually confirmed the birth of the conjoined twins and the footage, reports Fox News.
The video below shows the babies on a loop, crying with tubes in their noses, presumably right after birth.
As noted by Fox, “authorities have not released information about the rare case, declining to confirm the sex of the twins, the mother’s name or whether the parents were aware of their children’s condition before delivery.”
Though many details of the babies’ medical condition are unknown, it’s likely that the babies share vital organs while having their own separate heads and brains.
According to data from the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), conjoined twins are a rarity, occurring only once for every 200,000 live births. Sadly, they also have low survival odds. “Approximately 40 to 60 percent of conjoined twins arrive stillborn, and about 35 percent survive only one day. The overall survival rate of conjoined twins is somewhere between 5 percent and 25 percent,” reports UMMC.
Below are a list of various types of conjoined twins, per UMMC:
There are nearly a dozen different types of conjoined twins. One of the most common classifications is thoracopagus twins. These twins are connected at the upper portion of the torso.
Thoracopagus twins share a heart, which, depending on how closely they are joined, makes it nearly impossible to separate them and save them both. Thoracopagus twins make up about 40 percent of all conjoined cases.
Another common type of conjunction is called omphalopagus, where twins are connected from the breastbone to the waist. About 33 percent of all conjoined cases are categorized as omphalopagus. These twins may share a liver, gastrointestinal or genitourinary functions, but rarely share a heart.
One of the rarest types of conjoined twins is craniophagus twins, which are joined at the cranium or head. In fact, only 2 percent of all conjoined twins are joined in this way.
