Siamese twins die in Jakarta

JAKARTA (JP): Siamese twins, born Wednesday, died Saturday night at the Jakarta Islamic General Hospital in Central Jakarta.

Hospital director, A. Sanusi Tambunan, told The Jakarta Post that the girls shared a heart which doctors had thought would fail.

The only children of Eka Filianti, the mother, 25, and Mujito, 26, were buried yesterday.

Mujito said, "We are sad because they were our first babies."

Sanusi said scanning results showed that apart from two perfect heads, the babies had separate lungs, spinal columns, esophagus, stomach and pancreas. But they shared other organs such as a heart, liver, anus and genitals and hands and legs.

"An inadequate supply of oxygen had caused the baby on the left side to be weak since birth," Sanusi said.

Karnoto, a pediatrician, who witnessed the birth, said the new-borns' faces were covered with fetal membrane liquid which they had swallowed too much of.

"We were all shocked," he said.

They were born by a caesarean operation. They weighed 3.1 kilograms and were 48 centimeters long.

Medical staff had decided to take the babies to the Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital, but it was full at the time. The Harapan Kita Hospital then refused to admit them for "technical reasons".

For four days the Islamic general hospital's medical team fed the babies intravenously through their stomach because their mother could not breast-feed them.

Sanusi said their body went blue and they began having trouble breathing at 9 p.m. Saturday. The heart slowed and finally stopped at around 10:30 p.m.

He said the parents had requested "that their babies be buried immediately and not be used for medical studies."

Further analysis could only be done by X-ray, he said.

Sanusi said the Cipto Mangunkusomo medical team had planned to place the twins in their isolated intensive care unit and make further examinations when they weighed five kilograms. (10)