Big baby 'Super Tonio' is Mexican sensation

He is called “Super Tonio”, and at a whopping birth weight of 14.1 pounds the “little” fellow is causing a sensation in this Mexican resort city of Cancun.

Cancun residents have crowded the nursery ward’s window to see Antonio Vasconcelos, who was born early on Monday by Caesarean section at Jesus Kumate Rodriguez hospital.

Today, doctors reduced his diet from five ounces to three ounces of milk every three hours. In three days, Tonio gained seven ounces, weighing in last night at 14.5 pounds. He measures 22 inches in length.

“We haven’t found any abnormality in the child. There are some signs of high blood sugar, and a slight blood infection, but that is being controlled so that the child can get on with his normal life in a few more days,” Narciso Perez Bravo, the hospital’s director, said yesterday.

In Brazil, a baby born in January 2005 in the city of Salvador weighed 16.8 pounds at birth.

According to Guinness World Records, the heaviest baby born to a healthy mother was a boy weighing 22.5 pounds, born in Aversa, Italy, in September 1955.

Antonio’s mother, Teresa Alejandra Cruz, 23, and father, Luis Vasconcelos, 38, said they were proud of the boy, and noted that Cruz had given birth to a baby girl seven years ago who weighed 11.5 pounds.

“It’s good, because now with this one we’ll have a pair” of big babies, said Vasconcelos.