Morgellons: Mysterious Skin Disease

Morgellons (also called Morgellons disease or Morgellons syndrome) is a name given in 2002 by stay-at-home-mom Mary Leitaoto a proposed condition characterized by a range of cutaneous (skin) symptoms including crawling, biting, and stinging sensations (formication); finding fibers on or under the skin; and persistent skin lesions (e.g., rashes or sores). Most doctors, including dermatologists^[3] and psychiatrists,regard Morgellons as a manifestation of known medical conditions, including delusional parasitosis.

Despite the lack of evidence that Morgellons is a novel or distinct condition and the absence of any agreed set of diagnostic symptoms, the Morgellons Research Foundation and self-diagnosed Morgellons patients successfully lobbied members of Congress and the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to investigate the proposed condition. The CDC researchers issued the results of their multi-year study in January, 2012, indicating that there were no disease organisms present in Morgellons patients, the fibers found were normal clothing fibers, and suggested that patients' sensations were manifestations of “delusional infestation”.

A new study published today sheds light on Morgellons disease, a controversial condition marked by crawling sensations in the skin.

In response to increasing reports of Morgellons symptoms, scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed blood and skin samples from 115 patients in Northern California and found no evidence linking Morgellons to an infection or environmental cause.

What if it felt like there were tiny bugs crawling all over your body, causing oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin? That's how many people described their symptoms to government doctors several years ago, with health officials sometimes receiving up to 20 calls a day from sufferers.

Many of these people lived in California, prompting one of that state's U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, to ask for a scientific study. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people who said they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons disease - named from a 1674 medical paper that described similar symptoms.

What did the long-awaited study conclude? Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds.

Sufferers of Morgellons describe symptoms including fatigue, erupting sores, crawling sensations on their skin, and mysterious red, blue or black fibers sprouting from their skin. Some say they've suffered for decades.

The study, published Jan. 25 in the journal PLoS One, cost nearly $600,000. It focused on more than 3 million people who lived in 13 counties in Northern California. After researchers went through Kaiser Permanente patient records, they flagged 115 people who had what sounded like Morgellons. That's the equivalent of roughly 4 out of every 100,000 Kaiser enrollees. "So it's rare," said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team. But when the researchers dug further to find a cause for the disease, they came up empty.

"We found no infectious cause," Eberhard said.