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Boy born with three penises in Iraq


A baby boy has been born with three penises in what doctors say is a record of the first case of the rare anomaly.

The parents of the three-month-old baby, from Iraq, sought medical attention after noticing the child had a swollen scrotum and “skin projections”.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case with three penises or triphallia,” wrote Dr Shakir Saleem Jabali in a study on the treble-membered tyke published in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.

The second penis was about 2cm in length and was attached to the root of the first penis.

The third penis was about 1cm in length and was below the scrotum.

It is reported that only one was functional so the other two, were surgically removed.

The unidentified boy, a native Kurd from Duhok, was three months old when the tale was first published last year.

Doctors said one in every five to six million boys is born with more than one penis, with around 100 cases of diphallia – two penises – recorded worldwide.

Cases of extra penises are extremely rare, with Diphallia – where one extra penis is identified – affecting about one in every five to six million births.

“Triphallia (three penises) is an unreported condition in a human until now,” Doctors Shakir Saleem Jabali and Ayad Ahmad Mohammed said in the report.

“Patients with supernumerary penises have unique presentation and no cases are identical.”

A similar instance of triplet nether regions made headlines in India in 2015, but couldn’t be verified as it wasn’t documented in a medical journal, the Daily Mail reported at the time.

Doctors have yet to pinpoint the cause of the phallic deformity, however they have linked it to other congenital aberrations such as being born with two scrotums or anuses, according to World Health Organization (WHO) research.