A distressing video of a new born child with Harlequin Ichthyosis, a rare skin disorder, is being shared with the false claims on social media that a 'demonic' child was born in Assam.
In the the viral video, one can see an infant with thick scaly whitish skin, bulging eyes and swollen lips. The child can be seen crying while it lies on a bed-sheet on the ground as several people are gather around it.
The video is being shared along with an audio clip in Malayalam, in which one can hear a man narrate, "This baby was born at the age of 11 months and consumed all the stomach and intestines of the mother. The mother died in childbirth. The baby was taken out of operation, not a natural birth. The child was born to the mother of the poor household. The child was held by a nurse who was standing nearby during the operation. They died three hours later."
It further claims, "At eight months of age, the baby weighed eight kg and was 13 kg in 24 hours. The child was killed by injection. The incident took place last Friday at a district hospital in Assam. The child's body is still stored for study"
The same video is viral on YouTube with false captions like, "Mutant baby found abandoned."
BOOM has deiced not to include the video as it is distressing in nature.
FACT-CHECK
We broke the viral video into key-frames, a video verification tool, and ran a reverse image search and found that the video has been viral since July 2019.
While BOOM cannot ascertain where or when the video was shot, we can confirm that the child in the video suffers from Harlequin Ichthyosis, a rare skin disorder.
Harlequin Ichthyosis basically means one born with dry, scaly 'fish' like skin.
Infants with this condition have very hard, thick skin covering most of their bodies and facial features like mouth, eyes and ears are also deformed.
Previous cases of Harlequin Ichthyosis have been reported in India like in Delhi in 2018 born to a woman from Uttar Pradesh, and Nagpur in 2016 born in a farmer's family.
The survival rate of babies born with Harlequin Ichthyosis is very low as they die within few hours of birth as seen in the above cases.
There is no cure for the disorder but it can be managed with treatment, reported Hindustan Times.
One in 3,00,000 babies suffer from the disease according to a 2014 paper written by Ahmed H and O'Toole EA, two researchers from Department of Dermatology, Barts Health National Health Service Trust.