
Five-year-old Balia, one of the conjoined twins from Odisha who was separated from the head at AIIMS, died at SCB Medical College and hospital in Cuttack on Wednesday.
According to doctors, Balia was critically ill with pneumonia of the right lobe since Tuesday. He was attended by a team of pediatricians and anesthesiologist and put on a ventilator on Wednesday evening.
Doctors tested him for Covid-19 with two RT-PCR tests and one rapid antigen test, but all were negative.
“He had developed pneumonia and suffered cardiac arrest around 9 pm on Wednesday. He had tested negative for Covid-19,” Dr Deepak Gupta, professor of neurosurgery, AIIMS, told The Indian Express.
On September 6 in 2019, the twins were discharged from the medical institute.
The conjoined twins from Odisha’s Kandhamal district, Jaga and Balia, underwent complicated surgeries for separation of their heads at the medical institute in 2017. They were the first craniopagus twins in India to be successfully separated.