When you think of "blue skins", everyone thinks of Smurfs or Avatars, but there is such a family that also has a strange "blue skin" - the Blue Fugates from Kentucky, USA.
It is said to be a restored group photo of the Fugate family, showing five of them all with blue skin, dating back to the early 19th century.
In 1820, a French orphan named Martin Fugate immigrated to Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, and married a local woman named Elizabeth Smart.
But what the two don't know is that they are actually carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia (met-H) gene, which prevents the blood from carrying enough oxygen throughout the body, causing the white person's skin to turn blue due to lack of oxygen and the lips to purple.
Martin and Elizabeth had a total of 7 children, four of whom had blue skin. Because the gene is recessive, if children don't choose to marry someone in their own family, the odds of the symptoms continuing are not very high.
But trouble creek villages were sparsely populated and closed to traffic, with only a few families in total, and children had little chance of intermarrying with outsiders, so much so that one of Martin's sons, Zachariah, even married Elizabeth's sister.
The isolation of the village allowed the Fugates to continue to intermarry with their cousins for the next hundred years, thus continuing the "met-H" gene.
Zacharia's son Levy later married their cousin and gave birth to Luna Fugate, the great-grandmother of Ben Stacy, the last blue-skinned family member, who was once called "the bluedest woman ever seen", which the report described as "blackened like bruises".
After 1912, with the construction of the railway road, some normal-skinned family members gradually moved away from Trouble Creek and no longer intermarried with close relatives, so the blue skin gradually disappeared among the family descendants, and Ben, born in 1975, became the last blue-skinned family member.
Ben looked blue at birth, and the nurse panicked and prepared to give him an emergency blood transfusion, but his grandmother stopped him in time and explained why. Now Ben's skin usually looks the same as ordinary people, but when he catches a cold or gets angry, it will still turn blue.
It is reported that the "blue skin" was first discovered in 1958, when Luke Combs, a descendant of a branch of the Fugate family, took his white-skinned wife to the hospital for examination, and Luke's blue skin attracted the attention of doctor Charles H. Behlen II. In 1974, Charles recalled in an interview with the media: "Luke's skin looked as blue as Lake Louise in the summer. ”
In the mid-20th century, the story of the Fugate family spread, and Madison Cawein, an expert in hematology at the University of Kentucky, became intrigued. He found some fugate family members who were willing to cooperate and studied their condition and pedigree in detail.
Cawein concluded that they were carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia gene, and in order to make the skin change back to its normal color, he injected them with a blue chemical methylene, but the effect lasted only a few days, and later only methylene tablets were provided to maintain the effect.
But while methemoglobinemia can lead to developmental disabilities and seizures, the offspring of the Fugate family do not appear to be greatly affected by their health. Ben's great-grandmother, Luna, lived to be 84 years old, and her 13 children are said to be in good health despite their unusual appearance.
Jiupai News Intern Reporter Liang Xia
【Source: Jiupai News】
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author, if there is an error in the source or infringement of your legitimate rights and interests, you can contact us through the mailbox, we will deal with it in a timely manner. Email address: [email protected]