When it comes to "blue skin", everyone will think of Smurfs or Avatar, but there is a family that also has a unique "blue skin" - the Blue Fugates from Kentucky, USA.
It is said that this is a restored photo of the Fugate family. Five of them have blue skins in the photo, and this situation can be traced back to the early 19th century.
1820, a French orphan named Martin Fugate immigrated to Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, USA and married a local woman named Elizabeth Smart.
But what the two of them didn't know was that they were actually carriers of the recessive methhemoglobinemia (met-H) gene, which prevented the blood from carrying enough oxygen throughout the body, causing white people's skin to be hypoxia and turn blue and lips to turn purple.
Martin and Elizabeth had a total of 7 children, and 4 of them had blue skin. Since the gene is recessive, if children do not choose to marry someone in their family, the chances of this symptom persisting will not be very high.
However, at that time, the village of Fufuxi was sparsely populated and had a closed traffic. There were only a few families in total. The children had no chance to intermarry with outsiders, so that one of Martin's sons Zachariah even married Elizabeth's sister.
The occlusion of the village allowed the Fugate family to continue intermarrying with their cousins in the next hundred years, which continued the gene of "met-H". Zacharia's son Levy later married their cousin and gave birth to Luna Fugate, the great-grandmother of Ben Stacy, the last member of the blue-skinned family, who was once called "the bluest woman I've ever seen", and the report described her as "the lips are as black as bruises."
1912, with the construction of railway roads, some normal-skinned family members gradually moved out of Fufu Creek and no longer intermarried in close relatives. Therefore, the blue skin gradually disappeared among the descendants of the family. Ben, born in 1975, became the last member of the blue skin family.
was born with a blue purple look. The nurse was panicked and prepared to give him an emergency blood transfusion, but his grandmother stopped him in time and explained the reason. Now my skin usually looks no different from that of ordinary people, but it will still turn blue when you catch a cold or get angry.
It is reported that "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, 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 looks as blue as Lake Louise in summer."
In the mid-20th century, the story of the Fugate family gradually spread, and Madison Cawein, a hematology expert at the University of Kentucky, developed a strong interest in this. He found some members of the Fugate family who were willing to cooperate and conducted a detailed study of their condition and lineage.
Cawein concluded that they were carriers of the recessive methhemoglobinemia gene. In order to turn the skin back to normal color, he injected them with a blue chemical methylene , but the effect lasted for only a few days, and later only methylene tablets were provided to maintain the effect.
However, although methoglobinemia causes developmental disorders and seizures , the offspring of the Fugate family does not seem to be greatly affected by health. Ben's great-grandmother Luna lived until she was 84 years old, and her 13 children are said to be healthy despite their unusual appearance.
Jiupai News Intern Reporter Liang Xia
[Source: Jiupai News]
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