The newborn was born with blue skin. It turned out that there were more people like him

When Benjamin “Benjy” Stacy was born in 1975, he immediately amazed the doctors. The skin of the newborn was almost blue. As the medics began preparing the blood for a transfusion, the boy’s grandmother suggested that she had seen such a phenomenon before. She said it looked just like the “blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek”.

1. Blue skin was not unusual in the Fugate family. A strange shade was also noted in their distant relatives
2. There were no serious health problems associated with the color of the skin
3. The medical mystery was finally solved by American hematologists
4. More information can be found on the Onet homepage.

The blue people of Kentucky. They appeared in successive generations

When Benjamin “Benjy” Stacy was born in 1975, he became a medical curiosity due to his unusual skin tone. This case intrigued the hematologist Dr. Madison Cawein III, who decided to investigate it thoroughly. Especially since the boy’s relatives maintained that similar cases had already happened in their immediate and distant family more than once. Cawein collected blood samples from people who were related to little Benjamin, thanks to which he discovered where this strange story began.

And it was six generations earlier when Martin Fugate came to Troublesome Creek in 1820. The man was a French orphan, but that was not the most peculiar thing about him. It was the shade of his skin that caught the most attention. And this one was clearly blue. Fugate married a girl from Troublesome Creek – the extremely pale Elizabeth Smith. The couple had seven children, four of whom had blue skin.

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Troublesome Creek is a mountain village with a rather hermetic community. It was hard to get there, hard to leave, so the residents mated within a small community. And so the descendants of Martin Fugate bonded with their relatives named Combs, Smith, Ritchie, and Stacy.

Born in 1975, Benjamin Stacy has Martin Fugate in his family tree. One of his sons, Zachariah, married his mother’s sister. In this relationship, several children were born, including a son – Levy. He married one of the girls in the Ritchie family, with whom he had eight children. Including Luna who married John E. Stacy and bore him 13 children. «Benjy» is Luna’s grandson.

Why were the people of Kentucky blue? Doctors established the cause

Thanks to the work of Dr. Madison Cawein III, it was finally possible to reach the source of the mysterious phenomenon. It turned out to be by no means inexplicable or supernatural. Among the descendants of Martin Fugate, an extremely rare genetic ailment was diagnosed – methemoglobinemia. This is a disorder that causes the body to produce too much methaemoglobin (a form of hemoglobin). As a result, the patient’s lips turn blue, the skin turns blue, and the blood may even be chocolate brown. This is due to hypoxia, says hematologist Dr. Ayalew Tefferi for ABC News.

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The expert explained that people usually have approx. 1 percent. methemoglobin in the blood. When its level rises above 20%, the patient is at risk of heart abnormalities and death. At a concentration between 10 and 20 percent. the only symptom of the disease may be the blue shade of the skin. In the case of Martin Fugate’s descendants, the disease was probably not accompanied by other ailments. Most of them lived to be over 80 years old.

Why were it the descendants of the Fugates who were born blue?

Doctors managed to determine what ailment is behind the blue skin of Martin Fugate’s descendants. Since methaemoglobinaemia is a genetic disorder, it was not surprising that it occurred among members of the same family. But why aren’t all babies born with blue skin?

Dr. Ayalew Tefferi explains that when the concentration of methaemoglobin in the blood does not exceed 10%, the disease may be asymptomatic. The carrier of the gene does not know that it is suffering from methaemoglobinaemia. It is therefore possible that those descendants who were born with a natural shade of skin passed the gene on.

And when it comes to genes, there is one more detail worth noting. A recessive gene is responsible for methaemoglobinaemia. The disease can only be passed on to a descendant if both the father and mother are carriers of the disease. This means that Martin Fugate sealed the fate of his descendants when he moved from France to Troublesome Creek and chose the extremely pale Elizabeth Smith as his wife. Given how rare the disease methaemogloninemia is, it’s hard to believe that two carriers of the same gene were able to hit each other and make the decision to spend their lives together.

A condition that hematology students learn about in lectures today rather than in hospital practice would likely have ceased to exist in Troublesome Creek a long time ago. There would be far fewer blue people from Kentucky if people from the same family had not joined in pairs, passing the gene to the next generations.

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