US surgeon may separate two sets of Siamese twins in India

"We heard about them through the media and we would want to collaborate with the team down there," said Anupam Sibal, medical director of New Delhi's Apollo Hospital, yesterday.

Two days after the Apollo announced plans to go ahead with an attempt to separate twins Sabah and Farah Shakeel if their parents consent, the Times of India reported another case in Andhra Pradesh state.

Like the 10-year-old Shakeels, Veena and Vani, aged two, are joined at the head and share a major blood drainage vessel in the brain.

Dr Benjamin Carson, head of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children's Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, has agreed to operate on Sabah and Farah.

The Apollo hospital has been in touch with the hospital in Andhra Pradesh that is caring for twins Veena and Vani.

"Dr Carson has dedicated his life to the cause of conjoined twins," Sibal said. "In place of one, he will now supervise two similar cases in India."

The Shakeels from eastern Bihar state are to make the difficult decision on the operation during Ramadan.

The family are poor and a Gulf prince has agreed to pay all treatment costs after reading about the twins' plight.

Veena and Vani, who have no benefactor, are in the care of the Government General Hospital in Guntur.

"They live in the hospital because they have been abandoned," Sibal told AFP, adding that Apollo would have to raise contributions from the public to treat the girls.

But, said Sibal, before any tests can be carried out to identify whether they are good candidates for surgery, the girls' parents must be traced.

"You need the consent of the parent or identify who the legal guardian is," he said.

Veena and Vani do have a caring doctor, who, the Times says, turned down a request to operate on the Shakeel twins because he already had his hands full.

The newspaper also said that Yarlagadda Nayudamma, former director of the Guntur hospital and a professor of paediatric surgery, has successfully operated on three sets of conjoined twins.

Carson, was the lead neurosurgeon of a 70-member team that successfully separated seven-month-old German twin boys in 1987. In 1997, he and a team of 50 doctors separated 11-month-old Zambian boys, both of whom survived.

He was also involved in at least three other attempts to separate conjoined twins, including the unsuccessful 2003 operation on the 29-year-old Bijani twins from Iran.