Blue People of Troublesome Creek :: essays research papers

The Blue people of Troublesome Creek, sounds like a title of fiction novel, but the Blue Fugates were no fictional characters, but they were real humans that lived not too far from where we are today. The Blue Fugates were a very close family live on the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek. Martin Fugate, a French orphan settled in Troublesome Creek and astonishingly Martin somehow managed to find a woman who carried the same, very rare disease. The disease, later discovered, was methemoglobinemia, a very rare heredity blood disorder caused by an inheritance of a gene as a simple recessive allele. What one wonders after hearing ?blue people? is if they were actually really blue in color? Well the answer is yes and no. Some of these people were, in fact, blue, but they were not completely covered with bright blue skin from head to toe. Although there were some cases though where most of an individual?s skin was blue, but for the most of them it was usually just their extremities and/or lips and parts of their face. Their color wasn?t completely blue but had more of just a bluish tint. It was not a bright blue like you are used to seeing but more or less of an ashen grayish that was mildly bluish in appearance but nevertheless they were ?blue,? some more than others. Since methemoglobinemia is a disease caused by a gene inherited as a recessive allele. To get the disease, one would have to inherit two genes, meaning one from each parent. Some of the Fugates children had just that and they had the disease while some were just carriers of the disease. Methemoglobinemia cases were significant among Alaskan Eskimos and Native Americans. The Eskimos and Native Americans were both inclusive groups that didn?t interact much with what was outside their worlds. The Blue People fit that category well because they were a very small community and since they all lived close together in small area, most of them isolated themselves from the outer world. That in turn, often led to interbreeding, where Fugates would marry other Fugates, or their neighbors, which could and very well may have been their cousins. The interbreeding kept the disease alive and spread it throughout the small community. Methemoglobinemia has no serious, life threatening effects and an individual who has the disease can live a normal healthy life.