He has a rare genetic condition that has turned his skin a striking indigo blue. Fast forward to the seventies and Benjamin Stacy has just been born. Stacy is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith — but by this point, the blue people of Kentucky are just a memory. Yet, to the surprise of his parents and the hospital's staff, Stacy inherits the family's distinctive blue coloring.
This is because of a condition called methemoglobinemia , which causes methemoglobin levels in the red blood cells to rise above 1 percent. It turns the skin blue, the lips purple, and the blood a chocolate brown. Methemoglobinemia can be triggered by exposure to particular chemicals benzocaine and xylocaine, for example , but in this case, it was inherited and the product of a faulty gene that most probably caused a deficiency in an enzyme called cytochrome-b5 methemoglobin reductase.
Fortunately for the Fugates and their kin, there are no physical health problems associated with their blue skin. In fact, most survived well into their eighties and nineties. That isn't to say it wasn't a deep source of shame and psychological trauma. The family were embarrassed and discriminated against by their local community because of their skin color. This caused them to seek greater social isolation, which somewhat ironically, exacerbated the problem.
Few of these conditions are so unusual that people who hear such stories from historians refuse to believe. For example, how can a human being survive eating metal? This kind of statement may sound hoax but the fact of the matter is that there were people indeed in history who had had this ability.
Have you read or heard about people with blue skin? Today we are going to explore one strange condition faced by a Fugates family in Kentucky in this article. There was so much media hype around that time. There used to exist a group of locals for hundred and fifty years in the area of Hazard, Kentucky who had blue-colored skin.
It was later revealed that this ailment was a symptom of Methemoglobinemia. The victims of this problem were mostly descendants of the Fugate family of Kentucky, who came to be known as the Blue People of Kentucky or the Blue Fugates.
Methemoglobinemia is an extremely rare genetic trait that changed the color of the skin to blue. The Blue Fugates, at times are also referred to as the Huntsville subgroup.
Almost two centuries ago, in the year Martin Fugate, a French orphan settled near the town of Hazard, Kentucky. He married Elizabeth Smith and planned to start a family with his wife. Fugate was different from other men in that region. The couple was unaware of the fact that they both have a recessive methemoglobinemia gene.
This rare genetic condition has turned his skin a striking indigo blue. They had seven children out of which 4 of them had skin like their father. The pigmentation of the skin used to turn blue in color because of the gene. Locally they were known as the Blue Fugates.
The area in which the couple was living was extremely rural and isolated. There was no infrastructure like roads etc. Benjy's father, Alva Stacy showed Trost his family tree and remarked, "If you'll notice -- I'm kin to myself," according to Trost. One of Martin and Elizabeth Fugate's blue boys, Zachariah, married his mother's sister. One of their sons, Levy, married a Ritchie girl and had eight children, one of them Luna.
Luna married John E. Stacy and they had 13 children. Trost writes that he eventually lost the blue tint to his skin, but as a child his lips and fingernails still got blue when he was angry or cold. His mother Hilda Stacy, who is 56, appears to still live in Hazard, Ky. Other relatives are scattered throughout Virginia and Arkansas. Most of what scientists know about the family was discovered by Cawein, the grandson of Kentucky's poet laureate, who had done pioneering research on L-dopa as a treatment for Parkinson's disease.
Later in he was famous for another reason. His wife was murdered by chemical poisoning , but no one was ever indicted. Cawein heard rumors about the Fugates while working at his Lexington clinic and set off "tromping around the hills looking for blue people," according to Trost's account.
She remembered a dark blue woman who had come to the county health department on a frigid afternoon seeking a blood test. She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women. More families were found -- Luke Combs, and Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, who were "bluer'n hell" and embarrassed by their skin color.
Cawein and Pendergrass began to ask questions -- "Do you have any relatives who are blue? The doctor suspected methemoglobinemia and uncovered a report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Scott, who worked in public health at the Arctic Research Center in Anchorage, had seen a recessive genetic trait among Alaskans that turned their skin blue. That suggested an inbred line that had been passed from generation to generation.
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