{"id":172722,"date":"2025-12-07T23:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T23:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/172722\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T23:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T23:00:08","slug":"one-of-papua-new-guinea-conjoined-twins-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/172722\/","title":{"rendered":"One of Papua New Guinea conjoined twins dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Papua<\/p>\n

\nPapua New Guinea conjoined twins.
\nPhoto: Audrey Taula \/ Life Flight and NEST retrieval team\n<\/p>\n

Rare conjoined twins from Papua New Guinea had a seven-hour operation in Australia to surgically separate them on Sunday, but only one of the boys survived.<\/p>\n

Tom and Sawong were rushed into emergency surgery at Sydney Children’s Hospital after Tom began to rapidly deteriorate.<\/p>\n

The two-month-olds were medivacced from Port Moresby to Sydney on Thursday following medical advice that they undergo surgery as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the family, Jurgen Ruh, said Sawong was in a stable condition and the parents were grieving the loss of his brother Tom.<\/p>\n

“One body with two souls went into the operating theatre, and after seven hours of procedures we had two bodies and two souls,” Ruh said.<\/p>\n

“Sadly we lost Tom but are happy to report that we still have two souls and Sawong has survived the operation.”<\/p>\n

Ruh previously told RNZ Pacific the boys’ parents had been through a “rollercoaster” of emotions<\/a> since the twins were born in a remote village in Morobe province on 9 October.<\/p>\n

“They have accepted that they will lose Tom (the weaker twin) and there’s been many tears shed along the way,” he said previously.<\/p>\n

The twins were fused at the lower abdomen but have their own limbs and genitals, however they share a single liver, bladder and parts of their gastrointestinal tract.<\/p>\n

They also had spina bifida – a neural tube defect that affects the development of a newborn’s spine and spinal cord.<\/p>\n

Tom had a congenital heart defect, only one kidney and malformed lungs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Papua New Guinea conjoined twins. Photo: Audrey Taula \/ Life Flight and NEST retrieval team Rare conjoined twins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,47,42,43,49,46,44,45,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-172722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}