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.
Perhaps not coincidentally, people suffering from this desease are regular listeners of Air America...
That was my first thought, too.
I had a friend who worked for the state department many years ago. She worked with refugees and for her honeymoon, she and her groom went to Asia and then visited refugee camps. Talking about a working honeymoon! Some time after they returned, he came down with something that they could not diagnose--and he was a scientist at NIH! The last I heard many years ago was that it was believed to be a type of arthritis that you do not see here in the west. And that he had indeed picked it up at the camps.
I am not talking about just this diease, too little known yet, but it is a PROVEN fact that third world dieases are becomming more common in the usa and those dieases are being brought accross out border by illegal immigrates. That is not conjecture it is a fact.
Like, really?
Multicolored fibers that cannot be identified is suspicious at best. I ran to snopes.com as soon as I read this.
Having a third-world disease present itself in South Texas -WITHOUT- being identified with even more cases in Mexico is even more suspicious. Hippie aid workers leave Berkeley daily to run down there and try to get a new disease named after them!
If it's illegals, then there should be cases evenly distributed along I-35 all the way to Iowa.
Looks like yarn to me.
I cannot find one recognizable cellular component in any of the pics on that page.
Where's Scully and Moulder when you need 'em??!
And you've been here long enough to get the terminology correct -- they're chemtrails. :=)
Wow, it's really been a while since I've seen a good FR chemtrail thread. IIRC, a few years back, we'd have a couple of them posted every day for weeks on end. (Or at least it seemed that way at the time.)
I have been blessed with excellent health my entire life. But the one thing that has from time to time gotten me has been chicken pox-related viruses. At first, no one connected them. I had chicken pox twice as a child (yes, it CAN happen), shingles as a teen-ager and an eye infection in college that was shown to be a herpes virus related to the above IIRC. So when I had my own child and she got chicken pox, I talked to her doctor about my health experiences, and he said that it seemed I was just vulnerable to this type of virus and to keep a watch out. Fortunately, I have no longer gotten anything else similar. We're all so different!
Distinct geographic "cluster" areas of this disease have been noted near Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego in California - as well as near Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Round Rock in Texas.
Note: Although California represents 12% of the US population, 26% of all who have registered with the Morgellons Research Foundation reside in California.
look at the web-site posted in the story....they have the fibers...their minds didn't create them from whole cloth.
A three year old is not gonna have delusional parasitosis.
Hmmm...If the Health Dept. pitches this at the politicians that it did cross the border, may give them even more ammo to shut down the borders.
"Mother Jones News"
LOL - do you really read that???
Agreed. If I had to listen to Al Franken, I'd sweat black tar too!
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