An infant with the rare "mermaid syndrome," a defect in which the legs are born fused together, recieves treatment in the intensive care department of the Hunan Provincial Children's Hospital of Hunan Province in the capital city of Changsha Wednesday, November 22, 2006. [Sanxiang City Express]

CHANGSHA: With round-the-clock care from doctors and nurses, a baby born with a rare congenital defect known as sirenomelia, or "mermaid syndrome," is still alive 2 weeks after being found abandoned outside a children's hospital in Central China's Hunan Province.

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The baby, 21 centimetres long and weighing 2.45 kilograms, is in a stable condition, said Xu Zhiyue, head of the intensive care department of the Hunan Provincial Children's Hospital, based in the provincial capital Changsha.

Ultrasonic tests show the baby is a boy.

Doctors were keeping the baby alive via peritoneal dialysis, said Xu. Peritoneal dialysis is a treatment for people suffering kidney failure. It does the work that healthy kidneys normally do, cleaning the blood and removing waste and excess water from the body.

The baby was found in front of the hospital gate, apparently abandoned by its parents, and admitted to the hospital on November 12. A note found inside the baby's clothes said only that the baby was born on November 9.

The baby's two legs are joined together from thigh to heel. Doctors said the baby also suffers from severe internal defects - it has no kidney or urinary tract, its heart does not function properly, its anus and genitals are underdeveloped, its alimentary tract is deformed and its intestines obstructed.

"It is very difficult to conduct peritoneal dialysis on newborns, but the procedure is producing positive results," said Zhu Yimin, president of the hospital, adding that dialysis was helping the baby discharge waste from its body and thereby creating better conditions for further treatment.

Sirenomelia occurs in one out of every 70,000 births.

The condition is almost always fatal within days of delivery due to serious defects to the vital organs and because of complications associated with abnormal kidney and bladder development and function.

This is the country's first known case.

There are only two known cases of children with the affliction alive in the world today. One is Tiffany Yorks, a 17-year-old US girl born with sirenomelia whose legs were successfully separated when she was a baby, and the other is two-year-old Peruvian girl Milagros Cerron, who underwent an operation to separate her legs last year.

Doctors are studying the baby to determine an operation schedule, said Zhu. He said they planned to first operate on the deformed digestive tract and deal with the intestinal obstruction, to restore the baby's digestive function.

Several other operations will need to be carried out before the baby's legs are surgically separated, Zhu said. "The operations will be complicated and risky, but we'll try our best."

The hospital has decided to assume responsibility for the cost of treatment.