The Blue Skinned Man AKA Papa Smurf
Open Video In New Window
Papa Smurf or nut job taking to much colloidal silver turns himself blue just in time for Christmas. My father-in-law swears by the stuff as well. He's a nut-job homeopathic but we love him just the same, and on alot of things he does is right. But even the FDA warns about Colloidal Silver and it's side-effects, one which is ARGYRIA, the very condition that is turning Gringo into a blue man.
The question is whether anorexic America is willing to trade being blue in order to be skinny? According to the Wiki page, it's possible you could do just that:
In one animal study, a strong solution of silver nitrate (81 milligrams silver nitrate per liter of water) applied to the skin of guinea pigs for 28 days did not cause the animals to die; however, it did cause the guinea pigs to stop gaining weight normally. It is not known if this would happen to people if they were exposed the same way.
If memory serves me right, a town in West Virginia had a similar problem, where the entire population was blue.
Here's an interesting post about a Kentucky clan. Theirs was blamed on genetics, and in-breeding... but who knows.
Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugate's legacy left in the boy; that, and the recessive gene that has shaded many of the Fugates and their kin blue for the past 162 years.
They're known simply as the "blue people" in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.