Northwest Airlines provided the transportation from China to the United States free of charge as part of its Friends of China program. This is the reason many of us went into medicine. It means a lot to see a child with his face all distorted in the morning, then fine in the evening. It's great payback. Doctors don't know why, but Asian babies are twice as likely as Caucasian infants to be born with cleft lip and palate deformities.
Black children are half as likely as Caucasian children to have the problem.
The defect occurs when babies' lips don't form properly in the womb. Dang Xiao Na had the most serious of the deformities. The tumor, which was not cancerous, had grown to the size of a softball. Dr. Kant Lin, head of the Craniofacial Anomalies Center who removed Dang Xiao Na's tumor on Thursday, said she was recovering well. He said the tumor may have grown larger as the little girl got older.