Morgellon’s Syndrome
Scientific? Surreal? …or extra-terrestrial?
The issue of Morgellon’s Syndrome has been a complicated one, with undertones of what at first were inexplicable biological phenomena. Paradoxically, it is also a condition that a few hold-outs insist may still not exist at all, but of course that depends on who you talk to.
So imagine, if you will, waking up one morning to find that you’ve been assailed with uncontrollable itching. The parts of your body affected are your lower back, belly, and the skin on your fore-arms. The itching sensation is so intense and insufferable that it makes chicken pox feel like a cucumber oil massage (and I ought to know; I’ve had it. It’s pretty bad).
You scratch and scratch until your skin begins to form hard lesions. Dark crusts of dried blood collect under your fingernails — the result of furiously scraping away at your sensitive epidermal layers.
Yet remarkably, when you visit your physician, you’re told after a cursory examination through the doctor’s skeptical, half-slitted eyes that there really isn’t anything wrong with you. After some muted back-and-forth banter, the doctor leaves the room to attend to patients with ‘real’ medical issues. His nurse pops in to hand you a prescription for itch-relief lotion. Numbly, you head home, with words of disbelief and probably profanity bubbling at the tip of your tongue.
Two days turn into three. Four. Then, ten. On the eleventh day, things take a turn. You sit up in bed, scratch listlessly at your left thigh, and then notice something: there’s what looks like a thick hair erupting from one of your pores.
But is it?
Confused, you squint at it and find that it isn’t a hair. It’s something altogether different, almost like a piece of… fiber? So you lean down to pluck the errant little guy and then hiss in sudden pain. The fiber, or whatever it is, hasn’t come from the sheet or your blankets. It’s coming from inside your own skin. Wincing, you pull it out, and then notice there’s another fiber sticking out of your elbow. It’s barely there, but you can see the tip of it.
There are literally THINGS growing out of your skin.
Over the course of the next few weeks, you watch with a mixture of disbelief and horror as these tiny fibers begin to sprout from your hardened lesions, caused by the furious pruritis that you can’t seem to help. And you’ve even swapped your summer shorts and tank tops for jeans and long-sleeves, the one-hundred-degree Arizona weather be damned. Eventually, you decide to use tweezers to collect them… because how else is anyone going to believe you? You put three or four sample threads in a Ziploc baggie, carefully transport them to your dermatologist, and are stunned into crippling silence when she shrugs at the package and looks at you blankly.
The fibers have come from clothing, you’re told. Swallowing a nasty insult, you manage to stutter that you have plucked them from your skin with tweezers. She only shakes her head slightly, giving you the half-smile that physicians sometimes have when they both pity you and wish you’d go away.
So you trudge home, never knowing that behind your back the fibers have been sent to a laboratory. There, the red, white and blueish fibers are carefully scrutinized beneath microscopes. The fibers can withstand heat up to about 1700 degrees (F) without burning — and they never melt. Furthermore, they’re also found to be auto-fluorescent, a feature that they share with some species of jelly-fish.
What you also don’t know is that thousands of other people have complained about the exact same syndrome…and some of them claim to have even been confronted with top figures in law enforcement and officials from health organizations, instructing them that they keep their condition ‘to themselves’.
So what the heck’s going on?
Morgellon’s Syndrome was initially a self-diagnosed condition that first hit the world stage in about 2002. Mary Leitao, the concerned mother of an afflicted little boy, can be credited for bringing the disease to health officials’ attention. Leitao claimed that miniscule fibers were sprouting everywhere on her son’s body. She shuttled him to physician after physician, but no doctor really took her claims seriously. Still, she was persistent; so much so, in fact, that the health establishments she visited began to think that Leitao may have had Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disorder in which a parent or close relative harms a child intentionally for the attention and treatment that they — not the child — receive as a result.
Undeterred, Mary Leitao would go on to form the Morgellon’s Research Foundation, which successfully lobbied the Center for Disease Control to investigate the condition in 2006. She claimed to have named the disease ‘Morgellons’ based on the medical case history essay entitled ‘A Letter to a Friend’, written by a Sir Thomas Browne in the 1700s. In the essay, Browne refers to a ravaging disease that leaves patients to suffer from ‘harsh hairs’. Sadly, though, his description lacked any more detail, and it’s impossible to know whether the ‘harsh hairs’ he was referring to had anything to do with the blue-black-and-white fibers that began to plague thousands very soon after Leitao’s claims and research.
In the end, doctors believed Mary’s boy to be unafflicted. They were heavily skeptical of Mary, but by this point the ‘damage’ and the information on-line about the disease had hit its peak; thousands of people, many of them entire families, had visited the MRF page on-line and flooded both the internet and their doctors’ offices with complaints that they, too, suffered from these alien, sprouting fibers. (The MRF closed in 2012, thereafter referring any more complaints to Oklahoma State University.)
Soon, it seemed that almost everyone either knew someone who suffered from Morgellon’s Syndrome or had heard about it on-line and on TV programs. Physicians were befuddled by the number of patients having diagnosed themselves with a condition that couldn’t possibly exist, simply by going on-line and reading the intense testimonials from other sufferers.
They soon gave it a name: ‘mass psychogenic illness’. The real problem, they declared, lay in those who reported physical symptoms which had no organic cause, which would then spread to multiple other individuals, both within families and entire communities.
Dermatologists like Caroline Koblenzer faulted the Morgellons Research Foundation website, which ‘caused a waste of time on fruitless research into fibers, fluffs, irrelevant bacteria, and innocuous worms and insects’. Sociologist Robert Basthole offered his own take: that the internet and dubious websites are what creates these ‘socially transmitted diseases’.
But were they correct to denounce Morgellon’s Syndrome so quickly?
Among patient concerns were fears of conspiracy theories, chemical trails, nanotechnology, or biological warfare. Perhaps the most frightening possibility was that these auto-fluorescent fibers could have been part of an extra-terrestrial plan to monitor, infiltrate, and eventually take over or destroy the human race. (A significant number of patients claiming to have had Morgellon’s Syndrome also reported that they had been abducted by aliens, with some claiming they were victimized many times throughout their lives.)
Skeptics, especially in the health department field, likened this phenomena to the occasional spur of collective psychogenic illnesses in human history, such as the Dancing Plague, which is now thought to have been caused by infected wheat amongst common people in Europe.
Sufferers of the syndrome begged to disagree. How could they make up such a thing as foreign fibers sprouting from their forearms? If it were a hoax, as has been suggested by many, then why would they submit common sheet or blanket fibers for testing, knowing that they would come back as obviously identifiable? And the biggest question yet: if this were hoaxed, how could the hairs have been found to have unexpected characteristics, such as their flourescence, and their incredible ability to withstand heat without melting?
Sufferers of this insidious disease were left to soothe themselves. In 2008, federal health researchers began a study of the syndrome that would end up costing $600,000. The exact minutia of their findings are elusive, but the CDC (Center for Disease Control) ultimately declared that no infectious disease in these patients could be found. In other words: the origin of Morgellon’s Syndrome, if indeed one existed, was in the minds of the afflicted. Scientific American reached out to Dr. Michael Copello, a pediatrics expert and infectious disease specialist at Yale University School of Medicine.
“I’ve never found any evidence of parasites,” remarked Dr. Copello regarding his own examinations. In his opinion, the lesions in these cases were self-inflicted and could only be described as ‘unexplained dermopathy’.
But for patients with Morgellon’s, all was not to be lost.
A few brave and determined researchers quietly continued their own investigations. In 2016, an unusual phenomenon was revealed. Veterinarians discovered that some dogs were exhibiting a condition similar to that of Morgellon’s Syndrome. The disease, called canine filamentous dermatitis, produced extremely unusual legions with what looked to be fibers growing out of them, which did not respond to antibiotic medications. The fibers themselves were described as being either pink or teal-colored. And, in a new twist for researchers, a correlation was eventually discovered between the canine dermatitis and Borrelia infection.
In 2018, the Charles E. Holman Morgellon’s Disease Foundation declared that the syndrome was no longer a delusional affliction. In a review paper titled “The History of Morgellon’s: From Delusion to Reality” authored by Nurse Practitioner Melissa Fessler and Dr. Raphael Stricker, the long-dreaded syndrome was explained as pathology, which was itself a result of infection. To be diagnosed as delusional, the paper explained, a patient’s symptoms must meet certain criteria spelled out by the APA (American Psychiatric Association). It was further argued that cases of the syndrome to date were flawed from the inside out.
The problematic threads erupting from painful skin lesions were now termed ‘biofibers’, and they were found to be composed of keratin and collagen, which themselves were produced by skin cells. Blue fibers were thought to be made by melanin, but the red ones were still a mystery at the time the paper had gone to press.
While medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic still imply that ‘further study’ is needed, the C.E.H. Foundation has designated February as Morgellon’s Awareness month. And, since the human structural proteins form as an aberrant response to tick-borne pathogens, the syndrome’s new association with Lyme Disease has softened previously staunch medical attitudes about what it means to suffer from Morgellon’s.
Fresh research recognizes that to suffer from Morgellon’s is to truly suffer with a multi-system illness that is debilitating, slow to heal, and rife with fatigue. And, while there is much about the disease that we still don’t know, we can now say with cerrtainty that it is not of extraterrestrial origin. Thanks to persistent research and bold new discoveries, patients with Morgellon’s Syndrome no longer need to suffer in silence.
For now, there is no cure.
Sources: Lymedisease.org, Mayo Clinic, CBS News, Scientific American, Wikipedia, The Guardian
