The smallest boy in the world to have been successfully treated has been released from hospital in Japan.
The baby weighted just two hundred sixty-eight gram at birth. The baby was born by emergency C-section in August last year and was so small he could fit into a pair of cupped hands.
According to reports, the infant was nurtured in intensive care until he was released last week, two months after his due date.
He had grown to a weight of three-point-two kilogram and is now feeding normally.
Born at twenty-fourth weeks, the tiny boy spent five months in hospital. The Doctor, who treated the extraordinary baby, Dr Takeshi Arimitsu, said he was the smallest infant born on record to be discharged from a hospital, according to a database of the world’s littlest babies held by the University of Iowa, US.
He said he wanted to show that there is a possibility that babies will be able to leave the hospital in good health, even though they are born small.
The previous record-holder was a boy born in Germany, weighing two hundred and seventy-four gram.
The smallest surviving baby girl in that same database was also born in Germany, in 2015 and reportedly weighed two hundred and fifty-two gram.
Keio University Hospital Japan, where the baby was born, said the survival rate of babies born weighing less than a kilogram is about ninety-per cent in Japan, but for those born under three hundred gram, that falls to around fifty per cent.
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