LOS ANGELES, Aug 6: Teams of surgeons separated a pair of Guatemalan twins joined at the head Tuesday in a 20-hour operation, according to a doctor in the operating room at the University of California children’s hospital.

“Everyone had goose bumps at the end of the procedure. People were cheering, people were clapping, people were crying,” Dr. Houman Hemmati said on NBC’s Today show.

“It was more than optimistic. It was overjoyed,” said the doctor describing the mood of some of the 50 medical personnel in the operating room after the operation.

Much work remained as teams of reconstructive surgeons closed the girls’ cranial cavities and covered them with skin.

“We can’t wait till we see these kids playing, laughing, crying like normal baby children,” Hemmati said.

The cost of the operation at University of California’s Mattel Children’s Hospital was defrayed by the university’s medical center and the nonprofit volunteer organization Healing for Children which has collected 1.5 million dollars for continuing medical expenses.

The one-year-old twins have reportedly been in good humor and in good health since arriving in the United States for the operation.

Born on July 25 last year in a rural town in southern Guatemala, Maria Teresa and Maria Jesus Quiej Alvarez arrived in Los Angeles on June 7 with their 22-year-old mother Leticia Dawn Alvarez.

Their father Wenceslao Quiej, a 20-year-old farm worker, followed his family here in July.

Siamese twins occur once in about 200,000 births. Of those only two percent are conjoined at the back of their skulls, with their eyes facing opposite directions as was the case of these girls.

In many cases doctors make the difficult decision to save one child and let the other die. But doctors say that Maria Teresa and Maria Jesus have a better chance that both will survive.

The team determined in June that the two girls have separate brains housed within the same skull.—AFP