Bizarre baby born in Dolakha - Real or Hoax?
 

http://www.kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=69722

^^^ Please click on link to see pictures. I don't want to post the pictures because it's a baby.

The pictures don't look terribly convincing to me, but the news source itself seems credible. What are your thoughts?

That is not a newborn at all. While it may very well be a child and very well may have died, I can assure you it's not an infant. The arms and legs in proportion to it's body, the way the mouth is open(babies don't have really well-formed mouths, they're bow-shaped and the lips never stick out), point to a child of over a year old. And see how it's held in that small tub? No newborn could be positioned that way and remain upright unless it was tied up. Plus, why isn't it brown-skinned? Who transports a dying or dead baby in a metal pan through the streets? And if it had died before being brought to the hospital and was dead in that picture, I don't think the face would look like that, plus he'd be grey or bluish, no? I think it's a hoax and not a very good one.

I'd go with hoax as well, but I don't think your arguments are good ones ngdawg.

First of all, if it is a real baby, the genetic defects it must have could easily cause any number of other oddities (skin color, mouth shape, limb length, etc.). Also, it's certainly small enough (smaller than it should be) to be a new born. As for sitting upright(ish), the bowl seems to have a tall wall, and who's to say if it's dead that rigor mortis had not set in making the baby rather stiff. *shrug*

Regardless, I still think it looks too unreal.

That's a funny looking baby.

He bears a striking resemblance to this baby:

http://www.creationent.com/past_even...petfest/12.jpg

EDIT: I might point out that the above is Baby from the show Dinosaurs.

ROFLMAO Jeff... man, that show was hilarious (I was young then...)

I think this was an april fools on Ogrish.

Either way, it's a pretty horrific looking sight. But I'm fairly convinced that this is a hoax.

Looks like a baby born with anencephaly. I've seen pictures of babies born with it before.

http://www.anencephaly.net/

It looked pretty fake, but it does resemble the anencephaly babies.

I hadn't even considered that possibility, but I still think it's a hoax. The article stated the baby had died before being brought in. That doesn't look like a very noble way to bring in a baby, first off and something about the face doesn't say 'dead'. *shrug* Size in relation to age really wouldn't matter when speaking of a deformity, but again, it doesn't appear newborn, except those marks, supposedly blood, I guess. And why wouldn't the article say that this was an anencephalactic birth? It seems rather sensationalistic and simple considering what it's about. If it's not a hoax, that's a pretty ignorant way to report things.

I encountered this elsewhere, but I can't remember the source off-hand.

I also heard anencephaly advanced as an explanation. I'm not going to say this is or isn't genuine, but it certainly seems plausible. As to the supposed verisimilitude of the pictures, I have only an anecdotic note : upon first encountering photographs of John Merrick (better known as the elephant man) I believed them to be false. In the days of life-like hollywood protheses and dummies, it's easy to dismiss something as a fake when it is, in fact, genuine. Deformities can often warp what should be a normal human face or body into something barely recognizable as such.

As for transportation, diagnosis etc.. Nepal isn't known for being a particularly affluent country and even among the poor I get the idea this neighbourhood is pretty far down on the list. When there's no taxicabs or ambulances or any of the amenities that we're used to, how else do you get your infant to the hospital? Aside from that, the photograph isn't a candid shot; it's a pose for the photographer. One could argue it's decidedly morbid, but if you want the press to take you seriously on a claim like this you're going to need evidence.

Could be fake, yeah, but I'd acknowledge that it could be real too.

According to Wikipedia this was mistaken as a April Fool's Day prank, though I still have my doubts about whether or not it's real.

I guess I feel a little bad now that I laughed so hard when I saw that.

This is a picture of a baby born with anencephaly: Warning, it's kinda disturbing to look at, and a bit close-up.

Baby born with anencephaly...

This is a closeup from the page the news source has:

From news source...

Since i saw it, this is exactly what I thought it was.

I wanted to address a few things:

1. In many places in the world, birth at home is still the custom- either because that's the way it is, or the resources for the hospital are too expensive to use unless something "goes wrong". Also, this article was posted on March 29th, not April 1st. Not sure how it got lumped into the Fool's Day stuff, considering that fact. Oh well.

2. Noting the picture of an anencephaly baby, yes, that's exactly how they appear at birth. From the wiki, which is all correct:

"Although some individuals with anencephaly may be born with a rudimentary brainstem, which controls autonomic and regulatory function, the lack of a functioning cerebrum permanently rules out the possibility of ever gaining consciousness. Reflex actions such as respiration (breathing) and responses to sound or touch may occur. The disorder is one of the most common disorders of the fetal central nervous system."

3. Though I don't have the info for the pic above of the definite anencephaly baby, the weight at birth of the baby in the article was just 4.4 pounds. Whether or not experience tells us what we're seeing "looks like dead baby", it is.

4. In 2003, it was roughly 12 of every 100,000 live births in the US. It is considered to be "underreported" (according to the CDC) on death certificates and infant mortality reports.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pub...anen_fig-2.gif
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pub...spine_anen.htm

This table shows the numbers, from 1991 to 2003, of live births and cases of anencephaly:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/...n_tables.pdf#2

My point is, it seems American media will not cover something like this coming from within our own borders- mostly because it's not news. The only reason this is news-worthy where it's from is because that guy is wandering through the street carrying the body of a baby born with a defect, with a crowd of people trying to get a look at the crazy anomaly. Exploring the science of such an occurence is fine with me, but that article is just sensationlism, pure and simple, in my opinion. I guess there's not enough else to write about.

Oh, and I think people here would have a collective shit if an american news agency printed such a graphic picture of a dead anencephaly baby- or any dead baby, probably. It's just not appropriate.

Certainly strange things going on today, i just read a news article suggesting the increased use of folic acid to stop just this thing.

Yeah, the first paragraph of the article from the link posted above deals with that:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pub...spine_anen.htm