Pakistan Baby Boy Has Heart Outside Body

ISLAMABAD:  An infant in Pakistan’s Multan city was born with the heart beating outside his body. Due to lack of proper medical facilities in Multan, the baby boy, born on Tuesday, was later brought to the Lahore Children Complex.

Doctors said that the baby’s heart is functioning properly but a surgery is required to place it inside the body, Geo News reported. If everything goes well, the child will live a healthy life, they added.

The infant’s father is a taxi-driver and does not have the resources to afford expensive healthcare, the report said.
This rare disorder, where the heart is located either partially or totally outside the thorax, is known as EctopiaCordis and occurs in 5.5 – 7.9 per million live births.

Earlier this month, an infant girl, with her heart beating outside her body, was born in Phutkibari village in lower Assam’s Dhubri district. She was kept at the intensive care unit in Gauhati Medical College (GMCH). The baby was later flown to with Narayana Hrudalaya in Bangalore for surgery.

In August 2016, UK-based doctors conducted a marathon surgery on nine-month-old baby, Nathan Byrne. The infant’s thumb-nail sized heart was stopped for 15 hours in order to conduct the life-saving procedure.
Without complex surgery, Nathan would not have lived beyond six months. To give his organs a chance to recover Nathan was attached to a machine that circulated his blood outside of his body. The baby also had to be starved for 10 days after an infection left his bowel on the verge of busting.