Thousands tormented by mysterious Disease

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Plagues, pestilences and Diseases

Thousands tormented by mysterious Disease*

By HOWARD WITT
Chicago Tribune

AUSTIN - Thousands of victims concentrated in Texas, California and
Florida claim to be afflicted by Morgellons disease -- a debilitating
malady for which there is no known cause and no certain cure.

But whether the symptoms that include mysterious tangled fibers pushing
out through open wounds constitute a frightening new disease or a case
of mass hysteria is a question that experts at the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta are urgently trying to answer.

Depending on the CDC's conclusions, Morgellons might soon displace Ebola
and bird flu as the world's newest nightmare disease. But unlike those
illnesses, which are still far from U.S. shores, Morgellons cases have
already been reported in every state, as well as in Europe, Japan,
Australia and other countries.

"We don't know yet what it is, so our first aim is to try to
characterize it scientifically," said Dan Rutz, a CDC spokesman.
"There's a concern that there's an infectious process going on. It would
be very disturbing from a public-health standpoint if that turns out to
be the case. We don't have any evidence to support that, but we are
approaching this with an open mind."

Strange symptoms

For the moment, many health officials consider Morgellons a puzzling set
of symptoms; only if the CDC experts can establish a definitive
diagnosis and rule out other causes would Morgellons rise to the level
of an official disease.

But whatever it is, more than 4,500 sufferers of the syndrome, the
symptoms of which were first described in France more than 400 years
ago, have registered with the Morgellons Research Foundation, an
advocacy group founded by a South Carolina mother whose 2-year-old son
came down with the mysterious symptoms. Morgellons researchers believe
the actual number of those afflicted is far higher.

Morgellons victims have no doubt that the joint pain, fatigue and
self-described "brain fog" they are suffering is real. They say they
routinely yank blue, red, black and translucent filaments from the
crusty lesions that break out all over their bodies. Sometimes, instead
of fibers, they extract small black granules resembling tiny peppercorns.

"When the lesions and fibers appear, it feels like there's something
stinging you from inside your skin," said Stephanie Bailey, 35, of
Austin, who's on medical leave from her job with the Texas state
environmental agency. "It sounds so unbelievable that people just think
you are nuts. But this is not something I am making up."

Yet that is precisely what skeptics insist the Morgellons sufferers are
doing.

Psychiatric origins?

Some experts in dermatology and psychiatry say the hallmark traits of
Morgellons -- the crawling sensations, the mystery fibers and the
penchant of sufferers to obsessively collect samples of the granules and
fuzz to show their doctors -- closely resemble a well-known psychiatric
condition known as delusions of parasitosis, the belief that tiny bugs
are burrowing beneath the skin.

The lesions are self-inflicted, caused by incessant scratching at the
imagined parasites, the skeptics insist. The fibers are nothing more
than lint from clothing, tissues or bandages. And the hypochondria is
being spread thanks to sensational "sweeps week" TV news reports and Web
sites, which reinforce the beliefs of psychologically vulnerable people
that they have contracted a new disease.

"In dermatology, we speak about something called an 'outside job,' which
is a skin eruption made by the patient himself," said Dr. Noah
Scheinfeld, an assistant professor of dermatology at Columbia University
in New York and an expert on the psychiatric origins of certain skin
disorders. "When you look at the pictures of these Morgellons lesions,
they are classic for that."

The diagnosis is complicated still further by the fact that some
Morgellons patients do exhibit delusional behavior. But Morgellons
believers say such psychiatric symptoms are a result of the torments
inflicted by the disease, not its cause.

Desperate for help

That's what Lisa Wilson said happened to her 23-year-old son, Travis, a
former drug user who she said suffered from insomnia, fatigue, lesions
and fibers sprouting from his fingers for more than a year. Desperate
for relief, Travis tried burning the fibers out of his skin with matches
and dousing them with household chemicals, Wilson said. Ultimately, he
came to believe he was being followed by the FBI and ended up committed
to mental hospitals nearly a dozen times.

On April 23, he died of an overdose of more than 50 pills, including
painkillers and sedatives, an apparent suicide.

"The only pre-existing condition he had was depression," Wilson said.
"It was the Morgellons that made him crazy. You could see the fibers
coming out of his fingers, but the doctors wouldn't examine him."

Morgellons emerged about four years ago when Mary Leitao of South
Carolina was researching the symptoms for her son, then 2. She found a
reference to a 1674 medical paper that described a similar condition in
a group of people called Morgellons. She started the Morgellons Research
Foundation, which began accepting registrations from people with
symptoms in 2002. There are now about 2,000 worldwide, said Ken Cowles,
media and public relations director for the foundation.

"How can these thousands of people have similar things happening to them
and be delusional?" Cowles asked.

Doubted by doctors

Leitao said she long ago grew accustomed to being doubted by doctors
whenever she sought help for her son, who is now 7 and still suffering
from recurring lesions.

"They suggested that maybe I was neurotic," Leitao said of her attempt
to have her son examined by infectious-disease experts at Johns Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore. "They said ... I had Munchausen Syndrome by
Proxy" -- a mental illness in which a parent fabricates a child's
illness or intentionally injures a child.

But Dr. Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco Lyme disease specialist, said
he has no doubt about the reality of Morgellons disease, which he and
others suspect may be related to Lyme disease because many Morgellons
sufferers also test positive for the tick-borne illness.

"This is a real phenomenon," Stricker said. "A lot of these patients are
really very sane, down-to-earth, normal people who aren't psychotic or
crazy and yet have these bizarre problems with their skin. After you see
that over and over, you have to start taking it seriously."

Controversy is swirling around other aspects of Morgellons as well.

An Austin nurse-practitioner who put Morgellons sufferers on long-term
antibiotics, in violation of Texas medical protocols, had to leave the
state when her sponsoring doctor declined to endorse her methods.

"I'm just experimenting with treatments, shooting in the dark here,"
said the nurse, Virginia Savely, who has seen more than 150 Morgellons
patients and now practices in San Francisco under Stricker's auspices.
"When I hit on a combo that works great for one person, it's not as
though it works for the next person."