A 34-year-old man in Hoa Binh Province has discovered that he is bizarrely the father of only one twin following DNA tests.
The man noticed that the older the girls grew, the more different they looked from each other. When the girls were two years old, his family forced the man to get the children DNA tested. There was one positive and one negative result. Then the mother was also DNA tested to rule out whether one of the girls had been swapped in hospital. The results were positive.
Le Dinh Luong, chairman of Vietnam Genetics took on the case before the Tet Holiday and carried out the tests at the Centre for Genetic Analysis and Technologies in Hanoi.
"The girls look very different, especially their hair. One girl has curly thick hair while the other has straight and thin hair," he said. "If the alleged father does not match after two DNA tests, then he has zero chance of being the biological father. One of the girls has nine different DNA elements than the alleged father. Twins born from different fathers are rare. Only 10 cases have been found in the world."
According to Luong, women ovulate only one healthy egg per cycle but sometimes, there are two. If the woman has sex with more than one man within two or three days then it's possible that both eggs will be fertilised. He went on to say that demand for DNA test is increasing. DNA tests can give accurate results even during pregnancy.
Obstetrician Le Thi Phuong Dung said, "It's not common to have twins and it's rarer to have twins with different fathers. But the world has a few such cases like having twins with different skin tones or twins born months apart. This shows the human body can do extraordinary things."
