Blue People of Troublesome Creek :: essays research papers

The dark people of hard brook, sounds like a title of fiction noneel, and the Blue Fugates were no fictional characters, moreover they were real humans that lived not too far from where we are today. The Blue Fugates were a rattling close family live on the banks of eastern Kentuckys Trouble rough Creek. Martin Fugate, a French orphan settled in Troublesome Creek and astonishingly Martin somehow managed to find a woman who carried the same, very idealistic disease. The disease, later discover, was methemoglobinemia, a very rare heredity blood infirmity caused by an inheritance of a gene as a unanalyzable recessive allele. What one wonders after hearing ? robust people? is if they were really 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 unremarkably just their extremities and/or lips and parts of their face. Their color wasn?t completely blue but had more of just a dismal 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, inwardness 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 comprehensive groups that didn?t interact much with what was outside their worlds. The Blue People pass away that category well because they were a very small community and since they all lived close together in small area, most o f them isolated themselves from the outmost 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 existent and spread it throughout the small community. Methemoglobinemia has no serious, life threatening do and an individual who has the disease can live a normal effectual life.