A 25-year-old Malian woman has given birth to nine babies – two more than doctors had detected during scans. Halima Cisse, 25, from the West African country wrote her name in history as a mother of nonuplets — five girls and four boys — and she and the babies are all “doing well,” said a written statement from the Mali Health Ministry.
They weighed between 500g and 1kg (1.1lb and 2.2lb) and would be kept in incubators “for two to three months”, he said. “I’m very happy,” her husband told the BBC. “My wife and the babies are doing well.” According to the evaluation of doctors both in Mali and Morocco, Cisse was initially expected to have septuplets but gave birth by caesarean section to nonuplets, shocking the doctors, who had not noticed another two siblings during ultrasounds. After a two-week medical stay at a hospital in the Malian capital Bamako, the doctors requested specialist care for the rare case of Cisse. Mali’s government flew her there for specialist care. A woman who had eight babies in the US in 2009 holds the Guinness World Record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive. Two sets of nonuplets have previously been recorded – one born to a woman in Australia in 1971 and another to a woman in Malaysia in 1999 – but none of the babies survived more than a few days.
