What a whopper !

A Russian woman has given birth to a baby weighing 7.75kg (17.5lbs), more than twice the average newborn weight. The "little" girl, Nadia, was delivered by Caesarean section at a hospital in the Altai region of Siberia, joining eight sisters and three brothers.

"We were all simply in shock," reports quoted Nadia's mother, Tatyana Barabanova, 43, as saying. "What did the father say? He couldn't say a thing - he just stood there blinking," she said.

All her previous babies had weighed more than 5kg (11lb), a local reporter was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying. "I ate everything, we don't have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes," added Mrs Barabanova, who had the child on 17 September.

In January 2005, a woman in Brazil gave birth to a baby weighing 17lb (7.73kg), the heaviest boy yet born in Brazil, according to the Brazilian Gynaecological Association. Among the heaviest babies recorded are a 10.2kg (22.5lb) boy born in Italy in 1955, and a 10.8kg (23.8lb) boy born in the US in 1879 but who died 11 hours later.