By IANS
Hyderabad : Vani and Veena, five-year-old conjoined twins disowned by their poor parents, were Wednesday taken from Hyderabad to Mumbai for a possible surgery to separate them at the Breach Candy hospital.
The sisters will undergo a series of tests over the next 15 days at the Mumbai hospital and will then be examined by a panel of national and international experts to decide whether a surgery was possible.
While not many medical institutions in the country were prepared to take up the surgery, the Breach Kandy hospital recently come forward to conduct the surgery and the Andhra Pradesh government has promised to bear the cost, which is estimated to be in excess of Rs.80 million.
According to doctors at the state-run Niloufer Hospital here, where the conjoined twins were waiting for surgery for several months, about 50 doctors of different specialisations would have to work as a team for surgery.
The experts from the US are likely to join the team of doctors in Mumbai for the rare and complicated surgery.
Though a few twin-separation surgeries have been done in India in recent years, the case of Veena and Vani is complicated as they share the single brain.
Doctors fear that an operation to separate them might lead to the death of one child or both might live with severe mental retardation.
The twins born in Guntur were disowned by the parents, both daily wage earners, as they could not afford their costly treatment. Since then the twins have been in different hospitals in Guntur before being shifted to the Niloufer Hospital last year.