A photo from open sources
The story of the blue-skinned American family is just as amazing just as true: there is not a drop of fiction in it. Almost two centuries in This genus has children with blue skin.
Baby with blue skin
In 1975 in the city of Hazard, in Kentucky, a boy was born named Benjamin Stacy. The medical staff couldn’t believe their eyes, seeing instead of a pink baby a child with dark blue skin. An unusual newborn was immediately sent to the University Hospital Lexington (two hundred kilometers from Hazard).
For two days, doctors comprehensively examined baby Benji and concluded that he was completely healthy. However, they failed solve the riddle of his amazing skin.
The child’s grandmother shed light on her, telling a story leaving to the distant past. As it turned out, Benji is the last child from kind of so-called Blue Fugate from Trabbles Creek (mountains in the east Kentucky). Almost two hundred years in this genus were mainly born blue-skinned people.
The beginning of the blue-skinned family
It all started with Martin Fugate, who had a French origin and orphaned early. In 1820 Martin settled in Trabbles Creek and married for love to the beautiful Elizabeth Smith. Skin of the bride was white as milk. However, the future showed that both the young man and the girl carried the recessive gene since four of their seven children born blue-skinned.
Since there were no roads in those places (and the railway appeared only in the twentieth century), the family was almost a hundred percent cut off from the world. And therefore, the next of kin began to enter into incestuous marriages.
A photo from open sources
Blue skin is an extremely rare occurrence by chance, and incest makes the “responsible” gene inherited for many years. One of the sons Martina and Elizabeth – Zachariah – married his aunt – sister mothers. Over time, little Benjamin became his descendant.
The Blue Fugates lived in isolation for over a century. They tied unusual skin color with incest repeated in their genus, however, they failed to interrupt this practice precisely because of isolation from the rest of the world.
The medicine was found, but … the insidious gene remained
In the 1960s, the descendants of Fugate were forced to ask for help hematologist Madison Cowin, and he discovered in his patients a rare hereditary disease in which the blood rises methemoglobin level – blue dysfunctional version of red hemoglobin. The disease occurs if both parents a rare recessive gene is observed, and long-term incest only aggravated the position of the Fugates.
Interestingly, the hematologist was able to help his patients. To activate the natural conversion of methemoglobin (rare, almost unique) in hemoglobin, Dr. Cowin gave them methylene blue paint. A few minutes after taking it inside, the blue skin of people turned pale pink.
Benjamin Stacy’s skin eventually got normal too color, and this did not require medical intervention. After a few months after his birth, the boy began to “whiten”, and by seven years completely lost the blue “color”. Doctors believe it happened because the recessive gene Benji received only from one of his parent. Be that as it may, neither he nor the others Fugate’s heirs no longer suffer from the color of their skin. However the disease itself has not disappeared: with severe irritation, either when exposed to low temperature, these people turn blue immediately. And this proves that the insidious Fugate gene is still alive.
