A baby, who was born with two faces, has surprisingly been diagnosed as having good health.  The baby has attracted enormous attention in India and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of  the Hindu goddess, Durga.

Indian couple Vinod and Sushma Kumar last month gave birth to the one-month old girl, Lali, with two faces.

Technically, she has two sets of eyes, mouths and noses.  Only the ears aren't duplicated.  This extremely rare condition is known as craniofacial duplication or diprosopus.

Her family reports that Lali eats with both mouths, and also blinks in time across all four of her eyes.

Doctors say that the child is breathing properly, and appears to have no need for surgery to remove the 'second face'.

Mother Shushma, told local media that they were ambivalent about the child in the beginning.

"Initially we had some problem in accepting the child but now everything is fine... the doctor said everything is normal when she was born. So where's the need to get medical help?," she said.

"She's fed through one mouth and sucks her thumb with the other. We use whichever mouth is free to feed her."

Doctors say she is in good health for the time being, but will require further checkups on nose and oral cavities due to the duplication.

Although this condition is classically considered conjoined twinning (which it resembles), this anomaly is not normally due to the fusion or incomplete separation of two embryos. It is the result of a protein called Sonic Hedgehog homolog (SHH). 

The SHH protein and its corresponding gene have been found to play an important role in signaling craniofacial patterning during embryonic development. Among other things, the SHH protein governs the width of facial features. In excess, it leads to widening of facial features and to duplication of facial structures. The greater the widening, the more of the structures are duplicated, often in a mirror image form. This has been demonstrated in the laboratory by introducing pellets of the SHH protein into chicken embryos, resulting in chickens with duplicate beaks. Insufficient amounts of that protein lead to opposite conditions such as cyclopia where facial features are insufficiently developed.