'Cyclops' Baby Born In India

(WARNING GRAPHIC PHOTO)

By Marc Hartzman

A baby boy with one eye in the center of his forehead and no nose was born in India last week. He survived only one day.

Doctors were shocked when they delivered the infant by cesarean section from the 34-year-old mother, Veena Chavan.

Dr. Ashok Anand, professor of gynecology at the hospital, told reporters, "The child must have possibly suffered from cyclopia."

This baby boy born in India with only one eye and no nose died 24 hours after birth.

A sonogram during Chavan's 32nd week of pregnancy revealed the baby was hydrocephalic, meaning water was accumulating on his brain. According to the doctor's report, medical staff wanted to perform an intrauterine shunting procedure but could not because of the advanced stage of her term.

Chavan not only grieved the loss of her son, but was upset that she did not even have an opportunity to see him.

"This was my third pregnancy. I lost my previous child while I was carrying. I was told that the baby had water in the brain but never had I expected the baby to be born with one eye and no nose," she told reporters.

Chavan's one surviving child is an 8-year-old daughter.

Surprisingly, this form of cyclopia occurs in roughly one in 250 embryos and is a rare form of holoprosencephaly, which affects how the front of the brain is formed during fetal development. With cyclopia, the eyes and nose don't form properly.

Such fetuses are often lost early in the pregnancy. Thus, despite the higher-than-expected odds, it's rarely seen. The cause is often the result of a genetic mutation, though alcoholic and diabetic mothers are at greater risk of carrying a cyclopic child.

In 2006, India saw another cyclopic baby born in the city of Chennai. The baby girl survived and was taken home by her parents. No recent reports offer any further information about her survival.

A year earlier, a one-eyed baby girl was born prematurely in Russia but died almost immediately after being delivered. Reports claimed her head, shoulders and back were covered with thick hair and a "small trunk" was growing above her eye.

Cases like these have been documented for hundreds of years but have surely occurred for thousands. The mythological Cyclops dates back to ancient Greece and may have been inspired by a cyclopic infant.

In Armand Marie Leroi's book, "Mutants," he describes the first illustration of a cyclopic child, appearing in the 1634 edition of "De Monstrorum," by Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti.
Leroi writes: "[Liceti] describes an infant girl who was born in Firme, Italy, in 1624 and who, he says, had a well-organised body but a head of horrible aspect. In the middle of her face, in place of a nose, there was a mass of skin that resembled a penis or a pear. Below this was a square shaped piece of reddish skin on which one could see two very close-set eyes like the eyes of a chicken. Although the child died at birth she is depicted with the proportions of a robust ten-year-old, a legacy of the giants that preceded her."

In the 1896 book "Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine," a cyclopic baby boy from the late 1800s is described having "median fissures of the upper lip, preauricular appendages, oral deformity, and absence of the olfactory proboscis." He lived for 73 hours.

A preserved cyclopic fetus was donated to the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the 1960s -- though its exact age is unknown -- and is on display in the permanent teratology exhibit. Above its one eye is a nonfunctioning nose in the form of a proboscis.

"What's rare about our specimen is that it's a fairly advanced fetal age. It's not a first or second trimester, it's clearly third -- or to term," Anna Dhody, curator of the museum, told AOL News.
Also on display is a cyclopic fetal pig -- just one example demonstrating how the disorder affects animals as well.

Courtesy John Adolfi

Cy, the cyclops kitten, was born in 2005 and lived for one day. It's now preserved in a jar and owned by the Lost World Museum.

In 2005, a kitten born with one eye in Oregon made national headlines. Called Cy, the kitty survived just one day. Its body was frozen and eventually sold to the Lost World Museum in Phoenix, N.Y. It's now kept in a glass jar filled with alcohol and has garnered mixed emotions from those who've seen it. "It depends on how squeamish people are," said Christen Adolfi, co-owner of the museum. "Parents have asked that we warn people how graphic it is going to be. Most are fascinated."

According to Leroi, it doesn't take much for cyclopia to occur in animal fetuses. "Fish embryos will become cyclopic if they are heated, cooled, irradiated, deprived of oxygen, or exposed to ether, chloroform, alcohol, or merely table salt," he writes.

And in the 1950s, he adds, the Western United States experienced an outbreak of cyclopic lambs, caused by pregnant ewes grazing on corn lilies. The weed contains a plant compound called cyclopamine, which, in addition to having a toxin that causes the physical defect, has been known to kill brain tumor cells.