http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050219/sc_nm/egypt_baby_dc_10
BENHA, Egypt (Reuters) - Egyptian doctors said they removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl suffering from one of the rarest birth defects in an operation Saturday.
Abla el-Alfy, a consultant in paediatric intensive care, told Reuters at the hospital in Benha, near Cairo, that Manar Maged was in a serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus -- a problem related to that of conjoined twins linked at the skull.
"We are still working on the baby. After surgery ... you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing," Alfy said. "We have some improvement."
As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.
Video footage provided by the hospital, a national center in Egypt for children's medicine, showed Manar smiling and at ease in a cot with the dark-haired "parasitic" twin, attached at the upper left side of the girl's skull, occasionally blinking.
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The condition occurs when an embryo begins to split into identical twins but fails to complete the process and one of the conjoined twins fails to develop fully in the womb.
The second twin can form as an extra limb, a complete second body lacking vital organs, or, in very rare cases, a head.
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Question: Does the brain of the second head act normally? Is this head capable of thought, talk, and reason? Does it have its own mind and thought process?
The article here isn't clear on that. Does that second twin have any sense of what is going on? Or is her brain not there and she just blinks?
This is a tragic story for all involved.