Desperate parents plead for help after their son was born with 15 fingers and 16 toes

A baby has been born with a total of 31 fingers and toes to shocked parents who say there were no indications of his deformities on pre-natal scans.

The three-month-old boy, nicknamed Honghong, has 15 fingers and 16 toes. Incredibly, he also has two palms on each hand, with no thumbs.

His parents are now desperate to find medical treatment for him as doctors at their local hospital in Hunan, central China, tells them surgery will be extremely difficult.

Honghong has an extreme case of polydactyly.

The medical condition, where children are born with extra fingers or toes, appears in approximately one in 1,000 cases. But to have so many extra digits is extremely rare.

Honghong's mother also suffers from polydactyly and has extra digits on both her hands and feet.

She was worried about passing it on to her child so she had multiple examinations at hospitals in Shenzhen, south China.

When she was half way through her pregnancy, she even visited Futian District Maternity Hospital in Shenzhen to get a four-dimensional ulltrasound.

She was again told that the baby had no deformities.

But the couple, who live in rural Hunan, were horrified to find that their son's polydactyly is even more severe than that of his mother.

Both of Honghong's feet have eight toes while one of his hands has eight fingers and the other, seven.

Liu Hong, a professor at Hunan Provincial People's Hospital for Pediatric Orthopedics, told Honghong's father Zou Chenglin that surgery will be extremely difficult.

The boy is currently too young for anaesthetics but he will need to undergo surgery between six months and a year before the bones set.

Unfortunately for the impoverished family, the surgeries are likely to cost in the to cost hundreds of thousands of Yuan (tens of thousands of pounds) - too much for them to bear.

Now, the three-month-old boy's parents are desperately trying to find money to fund the treatment for their son.