More sightings of blue people

My daughter Jocelyn tells me she used to see a blue woman at a market in Montana; my friend Janice reports that, when she was a child, a blue family used to attend her church in Stockton; my sister-in-law Mary sent me an article about an extended family of blue people in Kentucky. I have never seen a blue person.

 As to the blue family in Kentucky, one couple, Martin and Elizabeth Fugate, carried a recessive gene called met-H. Met-H causes a condition called methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder that causes elevated levels of methemoglobin in the blood. Methemoglobin is a form of hemoglobin that causes too little oxygen to be delivered to cells, a trait that results in blue skin. 

The Fugates had seven children, four of whom had two copies of the recessive gene. All four were blue. Because the Fugates lived in a fairly isolated region, members of the extended family began intermarrying, a situation resulting in more blue-skinned children. Who knows? Maybe some of them moved to Stockton and joined Janice's family's church, or moved to Montana and shopped at Jocelyn's market.

You can get methemoglobinemia by taking certain drugs or chemicals that oxidize hemoglobin and convert it to methemoglobin. These drugs include some antibiotics, local anesthetics, and various nitrate derivatives, such as nitroglycerin—about 90 compounds in all. If you should turn blue as a result of taking these drugs, don’t worry. It’s not permanent.

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