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Chinese Boy Born With 31 Fingers And Toes — Parents Beg For Money To Help Pay For His Surgery

By Joanna Jaguar
Published on: 07:37 PST, May 5, 2016

A baby boy born in China in January suffers from an extreme form of polydactylism, a congenital condition that causes babies to be born with extra fingers and toes, and his parents are desperately seeking help to pay for the surgery to remove the surplus digits. The almost 4-month-old boy, Hong Hong, was born with an incredible 31 fingers and toes, two palms on each hand, and no thumbs.

Polydactylism affects roughly one in every 1,000 live births — it also happens to dogs and cats — but a child afflicted with the condition is normally born with extra fingers or toes on only one hand or foot. Hong Hong has a whopping 15 fingers and 16 toes — a grand total of 31 digits. The condition is genetic and is usually passed down through the family. The boy’s mother, who works in a factory in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, also has polydactylism, with six fingers and toes on each of her hands and feet. While pregnant with Hong Hong, his parents had hoped that the condition wouldn’t be passed onto the child, but ultimately it had, said the boy’s father, Zou Chenglin, reports the Telegraph.

“My wife has one extra finger and toe on each of her hands and feet, so we were worried that our child would inherit the condition. But after going to three big hospitals in Shenzhen, doctors found no birth defects on our son during scans.”

When the baby boy was born with 31 fingers and toes — seven fingers on his right hand, eight on his left, and eight toes on each foot — his parents were shocked but immediately began research into having the extra digits surgically removed so that their child could live a normal life. The surgery, however, isn’t as simple a procedure as they had initially believed. First, it will cost roughly 200,000 Chinese yuan ($30,000), which the family doesn’t have, and to top it off, doctors will also have to reconstruct the baby’s thumbs, as he was born without any. While it’s possible to live without opposable thumbs, they are essential to living as normal a life as possible, as they give the ability to grasp things.

Although the child is still too young to have the surgery, his parents have already started looking for help with the cost of having the boy’s extra fingers and toes removed for when the time comes. According to CNN, they initially took to crowdfunding on the internet to offset the pricey surgery, but after having raised more than 40,000 yuan (around $6,000), they decided to take down their crowdfunding page owing to some “mixed comments” they’ve received about raising money online.

This kind of extreme case of polydactylism is rarer than others, but Hong Hong isn’t the only child ever born with so many extra digits. In fact, he isn’t even the first Chinese child born with a total of 31 fingers and toes. In 2010, media outlets reported an unnamed 6-year-old Chinese school boy had undergone a six-and-a-half hour operation to remove 11 extra fingers and toes from his hands and feet.

According to Guinness World Records, the current world record holder for polydactylism in a living person is Devendra Suthar, a carpenter from India who has a total of 28 digits — 14 fingers and 14 toes — though there have been children born with more. Most of them, however, like Akshat Saxena, a young Indian boy born with 34 fingers and toes, choose to get them removed, whereas Suthar has embraced his extra digits and chose to forgo the operations needed to remove them.

Until Hong Hong is old enough to be put under anaesthesia, he will hold the record for most fingers and toes, with 31 in total. However, it will likely never be an official title, as his parents hope to save up enough money for the operations as soon possible.

[Photo by Anil Dayal/AP Images]

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