The king, who is convalescing in New York following a successful back surgery, issued the order following an appeal from the father of the twins.
“On an appeal made to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah by the father of Sarah and Ikram, the monarch has instructed the Ministry of Health to conduct a feasibility study to work out the surgery for the separation of the conjoined infants,” Health Minister Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah said on Friday.
The Saudi Embassy in Algiers has already started taking steps to bring the twins to the King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC), the minister said. The Saudi mission is in touch with the twins’ father to facilitate their travel to the Kingdom, he noted.
“The Algerian babies have a conjoined pelvis apart from the possibility of shared reproductive and urinary organs and alimentary canal and even a joined lower end of spinal cord,” said Al-Rabeeah, who heads the mutidisciplinary medical team for conjoined-twins’ separations.
He added that preliminary medical tests will be conducted on the twins at the KAMC to ascertain the success rate of the proposed surgery.
The minister said that twins should arrive in the Kingdom in the coming weeks and his surgical team would start the preliminary tests as soon as the infants arrive.
The Kingdom sends an air ambulance to ferry such twins from their native countries to the Kingdom. The carrier is equipped with medical apparatus supported by a medical staff. The parents of the twins are also brought to the Kingdom and they are given lodging facilities in the hospital premises.
Saudi Arabia has a team of top surgeons in the separation of twins with the experience of treating 63 twins from 17 countries of which 28 have been successful.
The remaining cases were not fit for separation owing to health reasons, he said in the statement.
