Anencephaly: The Reason for Frog Babies

Of the many disturbing abnormalities that humans can acquire during fetal development few make the imagination go crazy like Anencephaly. This is the genetic disorder responsible for many pickled freaks called Frog Babies. This is because this disorder always kills the infant before birth or shortly after.

Anencephaly is a cephalic disorder the results in fetuses not having a significant portion of skull vault, brain and sometimes scalp. Often these fetuses lack the fore brain portion of their brain and thus have no chance of higher cognitive thinking even if they survive the birth. This is also signified by the brain actually being exposed to air, as the infant that is born lacks scalp and skull to cover the remaining portion of brain present. Infants that actually do survive birth are usually only made comfortable. They are hooked to hydration systems, some nutrition systems and made as comfortable as possible. Those that aren't still born usually only last a couple of days before death finally occurs. Resuscitation of these infants is generally considered medically futile and are normally not revived if they go into the inevitable cardiac arrest.

The cause of this rare neural tube defect is currently unknown and is generally just referred to as a neural tube defect. Women who during pregnancy are exposed to higher levels of toxins ( such as lead, chromium, mercury and nickel) can have their fetuses develop this disorder. This disorder affects approximately 1 in 200,000 babies in the US, with some research suggesting that females are more susceptible to this disorder than males. It is suggested that some how a lack of folic acid plays a role in neural tube malformations, and this could lead to Anencephaly.

The affected infants have the appearance of being frog like, for lack of a better term. Many times the cranial vault is lacking as suggested above (or the brain is exposed all together). When the infant develops fully formed eyes this gives them the appearance of a frog as the eyes stick up above the head. Recently a baby was born with this condition in Nepal and paraded through the streets. Of course judging these people for doing this is wrong, this is such a rare disorder that one could see how some of these people could consider this infant a monster of some sort. Even in the US these infants were displayed for the public's curiosities. In the days of sideshow freaks many genetic defects of still born infants, including anencephaly, were termed 'pickled punks' or some other term. They were often preserved in formaldehyde and stored in jars. Many of these were destroyed but some pickled punks still exist today.

List of Sources:

Anencephaly article

wikipedia.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly

Medical Curiosities

community.livejournal.com

http://community.livejournal.com/genesgonebad

Pickled punks pictures

flickr.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmcd9/3886723064/page2/