Chinese baby in Hunan born with 15 fingers and 16 toes, parents can’t afford surgery

A baby boy in Hunan Province was born with 15 fingers and 16 toes. The infant’s case involves the condition polydactyly.

The poor parents of the baby, named Honghong, are seeking help because the surgery to correct polydactyly would cost thousands of dollars and would be very difficult.

Honghong’s condition surprised the parents because the mother, who has two excess fingers and two excess toes too, went through several pre-natal scans in Shenzhen hospitals, including 4D ultrasound, but doctors said the results show her child would have 10 fingers and 10 toes, reports Mashable.

Several photos of the mother-and-child pair were posted on Chinese website Imagine China showing the three-month-old child with a total of 31 fingers and toes. The baby has eight toes on each foot and seven fingers on one hand and eight on the other hand.

The difficulty of the surgery is because the infant is too young for anaesthesia, but he needs to undergo the procedure when he is between six months and one year before Honghong’s bones set, according to Liu Hong, professor at the Hunan Provincial People’s Hospital for Pediatric Orthopedics.

The condition affects two in 1,000 children. In 2010, another boy in China was born also with 31 toes and fingers, but the child went through a successful surgery when he was six. Until his surgery, the Shenyang boy had difficulty using his hand since three of the fingers on both hands were fused together. He was also teased by classmates in school as a “monster.”

The two Chinese boys broke the record set in 2014 by Indian man Devendra Suthar from Gujarat who was born with 14 toes and 14 fingers, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Before Suthar, the record holders were two Indian kids with 12 fingers and 13 toes each.