fetus-in-fetu

[Cheese]

wow...never heard of this happening before...

Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother's womb, a doctor said.

Triplets?

[SeeGeeWhy]

Like one of those crazy Ukrainian dolls.

[Canada 02]

Very difficult to understand how this is biologically possible. Sounds like a hoax or mis-reported by the Pakistani media. Where is the placenta and umbilical cord for the two fetuses?

[Cube Inmate]

There was a recent story (last few months) of a 30 or 40 year old man who had carried his twin brother in his abdomen all his life. When they removed it, they found pounds and pounds of screwed-up body parts, including a bunch of hair. Unfortunately I can't find the link.

Article on the condition

[JiriHrdina]

Dear lord. How gross.

[g_railed]

Originally Posted by Cube Inmate

There was a recent story (last few months) of a 30 or 40 year old man who had carried his twin brother in his abdomen all his life. When they removed it, they found pounds and pounds of screwed-up body parts, including a bunch of hair. Unfortunately I can't find the link.

Article on the condition

I remember seeing that on either discovery or the learning channel. I believe the name of the show was 101 weirdest things removed from the human body. I've seen parts of the show numerous times, definately worth the watch just for the wow factor.

heres a link to the imdb listing:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361270/combined

[Cube Inmate]

Originally Posted by g_railed

I believe the name of the show was 101 weirdest things removed from the human body. I've seen parts of the show numerous times, definately worth the watch just for the wow factor.

THAT's the one! Thanks.

[Hack&Lube]

They had this on grey's anatomy.

[ernie]

It's called a parasitic twin I believe (or triplets in this case) and there are various "types". In fact many conjoined twins end up as one viable child and the other parasitic. It think this is really just a variation of this. Freaky to be sure though.

Another thing coming to light right now after some custody battles are what the medical community are calling "chimeras". People with more than one set of DNA. For example a person hair may have DNA of one type while internal organs are another DNA sequence. There was one particular case in the states where a mother of two was charged with welfare fraud and had her kids taken away because it had been determined genetically that she was not the mother. Came as news to her of course. Long story short she was 8 months pregnant with a third child during the trial and the judge told them to test that baby. Sure enough when the kid was born it wasn't hers either so said the DNA. After extensive testing with a specialist who had run into this before they found that she indeed had different DNA in different tissues. She was unusual in that there was no outward indication of this...many chimeras will have checkerboard skin (black and lighter for example).

It is something that in some few select cases could really throw a wrench into the legal system.

[Flashpoint]

That is really fracked up. Fascinating, but fracked.

How do you feel if you are that mother, and they have taken your kids away? Then again, why were they looking at taking the kids away in the first place?

[Patek23]

Originally Posted by Flashpoint

That is really fracked up. Fascinating, but fracked.

How do you feel if you are that mother, and they have taken your kids away? Then again, why were they looking at taking the kids away in the first place?

Probably because "genetically" they weren't hers and she wouldn't of had proof of any other way of aquiring them so they probably assumed she had kidnapped them as babies or some other sort of method of stealing babies.

[Cube Inmate]

Yes, Homer...that must be it.

The DNA police were going around door-to-door doing random checks and found out this woman's kids weren't a match! What other reason could there possibly be for the gov't wanting to take away a person's kids?

Damn...hope they don't come to my house...I'm afraid of needles.

[Jake]

Originally Posted by Canada 02

Very difficult to understand how this is biologically possible. Sounds like a hoax or mis-reported by the Pakistani media. Where is the placenta and umbilical cord for the two fetuses?

Sounds like the fetus within the other fetus forms its own... I assume this is what happens before birth also.

It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

[Patek23]

Originally Posted by Cube Inmate

Yes, Homer...that must be it.

The DNA police were going around door-to-door doing random checks and found out this woman's kids weren't a match! What other reason could there possibly be for the gov't wanting to take away a person's kids?

Damn...hope they don't come to my house...I'm afraid of needles.

The reason for the kids DNA being checked was told in the article, you may have noticed this if you had decided to read it instead of being an ass.

[ernie]

Originally Posted by Cube Inmate

Yes, Homer...that must be it.

The DNA police were going around door-to-door doing random checks and found out this woman's kids weren't a match! What other reason could there possibly be for the gov't wanting to take away a person's kids?

Damn...hope they don't come to my house...I'm afraid of needles.

There was an entire 1 hour special on TLC about this woman and it's touched on in this months Discover magazine on an article on DNA testing and how it isn't the be all and end all due to human error and this type of thing.

This is actually a case tetragametic chimerism: someone who has at least two different genotypes which each arose from an individual zygote and eventually fused, when normally they would have developed separately as twins.

I believe this particular story came out when the entire family did some routine medical testing and they found out her blood and fathers blood type could not produce the blood type of the kids. It may have been for child support orders come to think of it. The state found this out did DNA testing and found out the father was the father but she wasn't the mother, yet was claiming them for welfare purposes and for this child support. It started out very innocently as a trip to the hospital and all hell broke loose. It took some time for her to get her kids back. What the DNA test looks like is something that would result from the fathers DNA and mother sisters DNA.

There was another case in which a woman needed a kidney transplant so the family all got tested and it turned out only 1 of her 3 kids was supposedly hers. Again the DNA test looked like her Husband had had kids with the mothers sister....except she had no sister so they knew there was some other explanation.

As an addition from something I forgot to put in my first post...Hermaphrodites stem from this type chimerism when the two zygotes are of different sex.