Girl Born With “Mermaid Legs” Now Needs Kidney Transplant

Milagros Cerron, a child from Peru known as the “mermaid baby”, is in urgent need of a kidney transplant.
Now eight years old, Milagros Cerron was dubbed the “mermaid baby” because her fused legs resembled the tail of a fish.
In 2005, when Milagros, whose name means miracles in Spanish, was nine-months-old, doctors began the first of three operations to separate her legs.

Seven-year-old Milagros survived sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome — a rare, usually lethal congenital malformation that fused her legs – but now needs surgery to reconstruct her urinary tract. The defect occurs in one out of every 70,000 pregnancies and there are only a three known cases of children with the condition alive in the world. Sironemelia is associated with kidney failure and gastrointestinal defects.