14 DAY TRIAL // 62-year-old Paul Karason, otherwise known as the real-life blue man or Papa Smurf, passed away at a hospital in Washington earlier this week.
Information shared with the public says that the man had been admitted to hospital to be treated for pneumonia. While undergoing treatment for said condition, he suffered a heart attack. Doctors were unable to revive him.
ABC News tells us that Papa Smurf owed his odd skin color to a rare medical condition known as argyria, or silver poisoning.
Thus, about 15 years ago, the man started taking colloidal silver (i.e. silver particles suspended in liquid) in an attempt to treat his acid reflux and arthritis.
By the looks of it, the colloidal silver proved quite effective in terms of ridding the man of said health problems.
“The acid reflux problem I'd been having just went away completely. I had arthritis in my shoulders so bad I couldn't pull a T-shirt off. And the next thing I knew, it was just gone,” Paul Karason told the press back in 2008.
However, in just a few months, the silver also turned his skin blue. The change took place so gradually that Paul Karason did not even realize something was off until a friend of his paid him a visit.
“And he looks at me and he says, ‘What have you got on your face?’ ‘I don't have anything on my face!’ He says, ‘Well, it looks like you've got camouflage makeup on or something.’ And by golly, he came in and he was very fair-skinned, as I used to be. And that's when it hit me,” Papa Smurf explained in an interview in 2008.
Despite the fact that he stopped taking the dietary supplements, the man remained blue for the rest of his life.
Not long after Paul Karason came to suffer from argyria, the FDA banned the use of colloidal silver in oral drugs.