Vietnam has identified an extremely rare case of
bi-paternal twins, twins with different fathers, a professor at a DNA testing
lab in Hanoi told
AFP Tuesday.
A set of twins born to a Vietnamese couple, whose
names have not been released, were recently taken for testing because of stark differences
in the children’s appearances, according to local reports.
“Our Centre for Genetic Analysis and Technology lab
has tested and found a pair of bi-paternal twins,” Le Dinh Luong, president of
the Genetic Association of Vietnam.
“This is rare not only for Vietnam, but for the
world,” he said, explaining that the two children had different fathers but the
same mother.
This can happen if two eggs from the same mother
are fertilised by sperm from two different men during separate acts of sexual intercourse
within the same ovulation period.
According to the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper, the
Vietnamese husband requested genetic testing at the Hanoi lab to determine
whether he was the biological father of both his wife’s twins.
The man’s relatives pressured him to take the test
because one of the babies looked strikingly different from him and the other child,
the report said.
The results indicated that the man was related to
only one of the babies. Ruling out a hospital mix-up, his wife was found to be
the biological mother of both children, Tuoi Tre reported.
According to Dan Tri online news site, the twins
were the same sex, born on the same day just a few hours apart, but look completely
different.
The report said the twins are now two years old and
one of them has thick, wavy hair while the other has thin, straight hair.
Another rare case of bi-paternal twins was reported
in the United States last year, when a court ruled that a man was only requiredto
pay child support for one girl in a set of twins after DNA tests proved he was
not the father of both.
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