Baby Born In Bay Area With 12 Functioning Fingers, 12 Toes

Friday, January 30, 2009 – updated: 12:17 pm PST February 2, 2009

DALY CITY, Calif. — A Daly City couple is beaming after becoming the proud parents of a healthy but incredibly rare baby boy this month.

Baby Kamani Hubbard has six-fully formed and functional fingers and toes on his hands and feet. It’s called “polydactyly” — extra digits — not an uncommon genetic trait, but Bay Area doctors say they’ve never seen a case so remarkable.

Born at San Francisco’s Saint Luke’s Hospital three weeks ago, Hubbarb seemed so perfect at birth no one noticed.

“Nurses and doctors, looked so normal they couldn’t tell, they told me he was six pounds in good health, that was all they said,” said Miryoki Gross, Hubbard’s mother.

But his dad Kris Hubbard noticed this spectacularly rare case of polydactyly: 6-perfect fingers on each hand and 6-perfect toes on each foot, which went well beyond a general trait that runs in his family.

“Some family member have had six fingers, not completely developed. But not the toes,” said Kris Hubbard, 34 and a postal worker.

In fact Kris Hubbard himself had nubs of sixth fingers removed as a child as these non-functional digits routinely are.

But Hubbards case is so vanishingly rare according to doctors, and because the extra digits are functional, it’s not a deformity to be discarded.