(Image Source: ITN)

BY EMILY ALLEN

ANCHOR ANA COMPAIN-ROMERO

Doctors at Peru’s Las Mercedes Hospital made a peculiar diagnosis recently for a three year old toddler with a bellyache.   It turns out the child’s twin brother was in his stomach.  Here is KSTP.

“The partially formed fetus weighs 1.5 pounds, nine inches, I think long. Has a brain, heart and lungs but they never developed. It does have hair, eyes and apparently some bones as well.”

The condition is called fetus-in-fetu. Medical Daily explains it’s ...

“ … a rare condition when a fetus absorbs his twin sibling inside the womb when an egg fails to fully separate, and happens approximately once out of every 500,000 live births …”

ITN reports the fetus was removed Monday. 

“And even though it doesn’t have a heart, brain or lungs, it does have a backbone and its living off Isbac’s blood.”

But, ABC talked to a neonatologist and his comments dispute ITN’s report. He says conjoined twins can live as parasites …

“But for fetus-in-fetu, the body of one twin envelops the other during development.
‘In this kind of situation, because it was inside the other boy, it wasn’t able to survive,’ [he] said.”

And Inquisitr notes there are benefits to studying the toddler’s condition.

“Parasitic twins are the link between conjoined twins and healthy twins and should be studied further.  In knowing how their formation process occurs it may be possible to limit the occurrence in the womb and avoid the complication to the healthy twin after birth.”

International Business News said it took doctors more than three hours to remove the fetus.   Doctors say the toddler is expected to live a normal life.