Posted on 05/12/2006 6:44:12 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
If diseases like AIDS and bird flu scare you, wait until you hear what's next. Doctors are trying to find out what is causing a bizarre and mysterious infection that's surfaced in South Texas.
Morgellons disease is not yet known to kill, but if you were to get it, you might wish you were dead, as the symptoms are horrible.
"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients.
Patients get lesions that never heal.
"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.
Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.
"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.
While all of this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in South Texas.
"It really has the makings of a horror movie in every way," Savely said.
While Savely sees this as a legitimate disease, there are many doctors who simply refuse to acknowledge it exists, because of the bizarre symptoms patients are diagnosed as delusional.
"Believe me, if I just randomly saw one of these patients in my office, I would think they were crazy too," Savely said. "But after you've heard the story of over 100 (patients) and they're all — down to the most minute detail — saying the exact same thing, that becomes quite impressive."
Travis Wilson developed Morgellons just over a year ago. He called his mother in to see a fiber coming out of a lesion.
"It looked like a piece of spaghetti was sticking out about a quarter to an eighth of an inch long and it was sticking out of his chest," Lisa Wilson said. "I tried to pull it as hard as I could out and I could not pull it out."
The Wilson's spent $14,000 after insurance last year on doctors and medicine.
"Most of them are antibiotics. He was on Tamadone for pain. Viltricide, this was an anti-parasitic. This was to try and protect his skin because of all the lesions and stuff," Lisa said.
However, nothing worked, and 23-year-old Travis could no longer take it.
"I knew he was going to kill himself, and there was nothing I could do to stop him," Lisa Wilson said.
Just two weeks ago, Travis took his life.
Stephanie Bailey developed the lesions four-and-a-half years ago.
"The lesions come up, and then these fuzzy things like spores come out," she said.
She also has the crawling sensation.
"You just want to get it out of you," Bailey said.
She has no idea what caused the disease, and nothing has worked to clear it up.
"They (doctors) told me I was just doing this to myself, that I was nuts. So basically I stopped going to doctors because I was afraid they were going to lock me up," Bailey said.
Harriett Bishop has battled Morgellons for 12 years. After a year on antibiotics, her hands have nearly cleared up. On the day, we visited her she only had one lesion and she extracted this fiber from it.
"You want to get these things out to relieve the pain, and that's why you pull and then you can see the fibers there, and the tentacles are there, and there are millions of them," Bishop said.
So far, pathologists have failed to find any infection in the fibers pulled from lesions.
"Clearly something is physically happening here," said Dr. Randy Wymore, a researcher at the Morgellons Research Foundation at Oklahoma State University's Center for Health Sciences.
Wymore examines the fibers, scabs and other samples from Morgellon's patients to try and find the disease's cause.
"These fibers don't look like common environmental fibers," he said.
The goal at OSU is to scientifically find out what is going on. Until then, patients and doctors struggle with this mysterious and bizarre infection. Thus far, the only treatment that has showed some success is an antibiotic.
"It sounds a little like a parasite, like a fungal infection, like a bacterial infection, but it never quite fits all the criteria of any known pathogen," Savely said
No one knows how Morgellans is contracted, but it does not appear to be contagious. The states with the highest number of cases are Texas, California and Florida.
The only connection found so far is that more than half of the Morgellons patients are also diagnosed with Lyme disease.
For more information on Morgellons, visit the research foundation's Web site at www.morgellons.org.
We also read that they don't know what causes it, yet you are certain it's not contagious.
I bet you think cervical cancer isn't contagious either. Ever hear of human papilloma virus?
Good government?
Medications have been known to trigger dp as well.
Nothing to see here, move along...™
There are some who seem to think that if they don't know something, it must not exist; the God complex I suppose. Heck, there are just some bad doctors out there. I came down with Bell's Palsy a few years ago. Not ever been familiar with it, it scared the heck out of me and off to the emergency room I went thinking I was having a stroke. My face was obviously paralyzed; I couldn't move a muscle on the left side of my face. The ER doc diagnosed it as sinusitis, interrupting and dismissing my complaints that I had never heard of sinusitis paralyzing one's head.
Read the scifi series of books,
The war against the chtorr by david gerrold.
Earth is attacked not by flying suacers or spaceships, but by bioweapons who overwhelm and replace terrestial ecology.
Definitely a bad day for greenpeace and the sierra club.
( as if they have a good day)
Beware the worms.and bunnies.
I'm sorry. You are not permitted to speculate on FR threads.
Didn't you get the memo?
>Where did you get your logic lessons? <
From here:
http://www.morgellons.org/img/Adv-16.jpg
"The two main occupational groups reporting symptoms of Morgellon's disease are nurses and teachers. Nurses outnumber teachers 3 to 1, but both occupational groups represent a significant percentage of patients with this disease."
Creepy bump!
Good point. Maybe it comes from someplace where it is usually spread by sand fleas...
There are quite a lot of illegal immigrants in CA and FL, though, too. Makes me all the more suspicious.
Too bad the ER is packed solid with people using it as their primary care physician...
" I came down with Bell's Palsy a few years ago. Not ever been familiar with it, it scared the heck out of me and off to the emergency room I went thinking I was having a stroke. My face was obviously paralyzed; I couldn't move a muscle on the left side of my face."
Exact same thing happened to me in college. I thought I had a brain tumor or something. My doc at least diagnosed it correctly, though. My roommates got a kick out of watching me take a sip of something and half of it fall out of my mouth. In fact, they tried to make me laugh, just so half of my face would look weird.
Entirely possible. I know mexico is a third world hellhole but mexicans have been invading us for years and we haven't seen the upswing in infectious diseases that we've seen recently.
My money is on all the OTM's that are caught and released.
And my biggest fear is just what you inferred. The possibility that this is originating in the middle east. Who's to say they aren't experimenting with bio weapons and sending infected persons across the border?
Perhaps it's related to Fibromyalgia.
Applause. Applause.
Oh great. I'm in a red spot.
Pestilence...
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