DOCTORS watched two Siamese twins die in Gweru because Zimbabwe has no medical expertise “to deal with such situations”, New Zimbabwe.com can reveal.
In another damning indictment of the state of Zimbabwe’s health system, health staff at Gweru General Hospital FAILED to detect in scans that the babies’ mother was pregnant with twins.
The conjoined twins who shared the same heart, umbilical cord and abdomen were born last Sunday and died just 24 hours later.
Heartbroken dad, Rodney Ndlovu, said: “My wife’s tummy was so big that during the initial stages we expected twins, but when she went for a scan the doctors said that she would have one baby.
“We were even given the date when she was going to deliver but we panicked when we were told during labour that she would deliver via the caesarean section.
“They were not ready to deliver Siamese twins. It may have been different if the complication had been noted in the scan.”
The hospital has admitted it had no specialist care to give the Siamese twins a fighting chance.
A doctor at the hospital told New Zimbabwe.com: “We don’t have doctors that can deal with such situations in Zimbabwe, especially for twins that share the same heart. There was nothing we could do here.”
Dr Anferson Chimusoro, the Medical Director for the Midlands Province said: “It is saddening the twins had to die.”
She revealed the Siamese twins were the first to be born in Gweru on record.
“There have been some cases in other parts of the country where Siamese twins are born. In Gweru it’s the first on record,” he said.
Last year, an international fund-raising effort was underway to winch two Tsholotsho Siamese twins out of Zimbabwe when the tots died at Bulawayo’s Mpilo Central Hospital due to lack of specialist care.
Zimbabwe is coming out of a decade-long economic crisis which decimated the health sector and forced the flight of thousands of experienced health workers.
Conjoined twins are a rare phenomenon, and mostly common in Southwest Asia and Africa.
Scientists have presented two theories for the phenomenon. The generally accepted theory is fission, in which the fertilised egg splits partially. Others have promoted a second theory called fusion, in which a fertilised egg completely separates, but stem cells, which search for similar cells, find like-stem cells on the other twin and fuse the twins together.
So rare are conjoined twins that their occurrence is estimated to range from 1 in 50,000 births to 1 in 200,000 births. The overall survival rate for conjoined twins is approximately one in four.
Conjoined twins are also known as 'Siamese' twins, named after the famous pair of Chang and Eng Bunker from Siam, now Thailand.