It began the way it so often begins, so those that tell of it say: with an explosion of crawling, itching and biting, his skin suddenly alive, roaring, teeming, inhabited. A metropolis of activity on his body.
This is not what fifty-five-year-old IT executives from Birmingham expect to happen to them on fly-drive breaks to New England. But there it was and there he was, in an out-of-town multiscreen cinema in a mall somewhere near Boston, writhing, scratching, rubbing, cursing. His legs, arms, torso — God, it was everywhere. He tried not to disturb his wife and two sons as they gazed up, obliviously, at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It must be fleas, he decided. Fleas in the seat. (...)
One evening, nearly a year after his first attack, Paul’s wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when she noticed that the cotton swab had gathered a bizarre blue-black haze from his skin. Paul dressed quickly, drove as fast as he could to Maplin’s, bought a microscope and placed the cotton beneath the lens. He focused. He frowned. He focused again. His mouth dropped open.
Dear God, what were they? Those weird, curling, colored fibers? He opened his laptop and Googled: ‘Fibers. Itch. Sting. Skin.’ And there it was — it must be! All the symptoms fit. He had a disease called Morgellons. A new disease.
According to the website, the fibers were the product of creatures, unknown to science, that breed in the body. Paul felt the strong arms of relief lift the worry away. Everything was answered, the crucial mystery solved. But as he pored gratefully through the information on that laptop screen, he had no idea that Morgellons would actually turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.
Morgellons was named in 2002, by American mom Mary Leitao, after she learned of a similar-sounding (but actually unrelated) condition that was reported in the seventeenth century, in which children sprouted hairs on their backs.
Leitao’s son had been complaining of sores around his mouth and the sensation of ‘bugs’. Using a microscope, she found him to be covered in red, blue, black and white fibers. Since then, experts at Leitao’s Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by over twelve thousand affected families. Educational and support group The Charles E. Holman Foundation claim there are patients in “every continent except Antarctica.”
Even folk singer Joni Mitchell has been affected, complaining to the LA Times about “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space . . . Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin . . . they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
Since Leitao began drawing attention to the problem, thousands of sufferers in the US have written to members of Congress, demanding action. In response, more than forty senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the government agency the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to investigate. In 2008, the CDC established a special task force in collaboration with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with an initial budget of one million dollars. At a 2008 press conference, held to update the media on the agreed protocol for a scientific study, principal investigator Dr Michele Pearson admitted, “We don’t know what it is.”
So, it is new and it is frightening and it is profoundly peculiar. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you would find the strangest fact of all about the disease.
Morgellons doesn’t exist.
This is not what fifty-five-year-old IT executives from Birmingham expect to happen to them on fly-drive breaks to New England. But there it was and there he was, in an out-of-town multiscreen cinema in a mall somewhere near Boston, writhing, scratching, rubbing, cursing. His legs, arms, torso — God, it was everywhere. He tried not to disturb his wife and two sons as they gazed up, obliviously, at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It must be fleas, he decided. Fleas in the seat. (...)
One evening, nearly a year after his first attack, Paul’s wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when she noticed that the cotton swab had gathered a bizarre blue-black haze from his skin. Paul dressed quickly, drove as fast as he could to Maplin’s, bought a microscope and placed the cotton beneath the lens. He focused. He frowned. He focused again. His mouth dropped open.Dear God, what were they? Those weird, curling, colored fibers? He opened his laptop and Googled: ‘Fibers. Itch. Sting. Skin.’ And there it was — it must be! All the symptoms fit. He had a disease called Morgellons. A new disease.
According to the website, the fibers were the product of creatures, unknown to science, that breed in the body. Paul felt the strong arms of relief lift the worry away. Everything was answered, the crucial mystery solved. But as he pored gratefully through the information on that laptop screen, he had no idea that Morgellons would actually turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.
Morgellons was named in 2002, by American mom Mary Leitao, after she learned of a similar-sounding (but actually unrelated) condition that was reported in the seventeenth century, in which children sprouted hairs on their backs.
Leitao’s son had been complaining of sores around his mouth and the sensation of ‘bugs’. Using a microscope, she found him to be covered in red, blue, black and white fibers. Since then, experts at Leitao’s Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by over twelve thousand affected families. Educational and support group The Charles E. Holman Foundation claim there are patients in “every continent except Antarctica.”
Even folk singer Joni Mitchell has been affected, complaining to the LA Times about “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space . . . Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin . . . they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
Since Leitao began drawing attention to the problem, thousands of sufferers in the US have written to members of Congress, demanding action. In response, more than forty senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the government agency the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to investigate. In 2008, the CDC established a special task force in collaboration with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with an initial budget of one million dollars. At a 2008 press conference, held to update the media on the agreed protocol for a scientific study, principal investigator Dr Michele Pearson admitted, “We don’t know what it is.”
So, it is new and it is frightening and it is profoundly peculiar. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you would find the strangest fact of all about the disease.
Morgellons doesn’t exist.
by Will Storr, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Image: uncredited
