Jeff wrote:The Facts Behind The Medical Mystery Of Morgellons
KTNV-TV, May 7, 2008
It has been nearly a year since Action News first started investigating a bizarre skin condition known as Morgellons.
The mysterious infection causes open sores with string like fibers poking out of the skin.
The condition has baffled health officials, leaving patients confused and frustrated.
Action News Kimberly Tere has more on the findings of one San Francisco doctor who says the disease is very real, very serious and talks about what might be causing it.
It sounds more like science fiction or something out of a horror movie.
"When it hits, it just feels like something is crawling all over me," said patient Judy Johnson.
Patients often complain of having mysterious red, blue and black fibers growing out of their bodies.
"It is almost like these things are alive," said Johnson.
It is called Morgellons and patients say it feels like insects are moving beneath and even biting their skin.
"In addition to the skin lesions, they tend to get other symptoms such as fatigue, muscle aches, joint pains and a lot of neurological and neuropsychiatries symptoms," said Dr. Stricker.
More than 11,000 people in the United States have reported the same symptoms forcing the medical community to take a more serious look at Morgellons disease.
San Francisco Doctor Raphael Stricker has been researching the condition and thinks he may have an explanation.
"What we have found is there is a plant bacteria that is often found in the lesions that these patients have and we think that this plant bacteria may be involved in the cause of the disease," said Dr. Stricker.
Dr. Stricker says his patients have one thing in common.
"These patients tend to have exposure to soil or dirt or some sort of plant life," said Dr. Stricker.
But exactly how is the plant bacteria getting into their systems?
Dr. Stricker believes it could be ticks.
"We know that ticks can carry something like 40 different bacteria and so it is possible the ticks are picking up the plant bacteria and transmitting it along with the Lyme Disease infecting people through their bite," said Dr. Stricker.
In a recent study of Morgellons patients, 43 out of 44 of them tested positive for Lyme Disease.
"Very often when patients get treated for the Lyme Disease the Morgellons also gets better. So it does suggest that antibiotic treatment is useful for this disease," said Dr. Stricker.
But an antibiotic treatment is not a miracle cure.
"These people have been going from doctor to doctor and being told they are crazy. There is nothing wrong with them," said Dr. Stricker.
It is a major source of frustration for patients who are suffering.
"If I could have performed an amputation to willingly get rid of the pain, I think I would have willingly cut my leg off. It hurt that bad," said Johnson.
Doctors hope that the medical community accepts this condition not as science fiction, but as science fact.
"Once we recognize this as a real disease then we can really start to do research and see what is causing it and try to find a cure," said Dr. Stricker.
The US Centers For Disease Control is about to begin its first study on Morgellons.
It is paying California based health care giant Kaiser Permanente $340,000 to test and interview patients with symptoms of the condition.
The one year study will attempt to define the conditions and determine how common it is.
http://www.ktnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8287547
monster wrote:Jeff wrote:In a recent study of Morgellons patients, 43 out of 44 of them tested positive for Lyme Disease.
Now that's interesting, considering that the Lyme disease bacterium (B. burgdorferi) was a bioweapon:There are also a few conspiracy theories about Lyme disease. We know that the bacterium was developed as a biowarfare weapon by the Soviet Union, and one theory claims that it was also developed in the United States and that it got loose here.
Link
I actually hope Morgellon's traces back to some GM crop, so we can have a big moratorium on the whole thing and put a stop to it. If Satan was a company, he would be Monsanto.
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?p=250520&highlight=pediculosis#250520
c2w wrote:An addendum: I did some research on the Morgellons Research Foundation after posting last night, and just wanted to add that there are a lot of small but distinct red flags wrt various aspects of that organization. Among the things that caught my eye were:
* Its curiously narrowcast focus on personal media appearances for the same three to six key members.
* The website's dedication to the collection of personal data of little-to-no clinical value from visitors to the site.
* The disparity between the six-person board of directors listed on the website and the two-person board of directors (Mary Leitao, Douglas Buckner) it reports on its IRS filings, on which information is submitted under penalty of perjury.
* Some minor inconsistencies and/or misleading representations of fact, such as literature that sometimes refers to board member Douglas Buckner as a Ph.D, sometimes as an MD. Or the prominence given to the failure of the Tulsa PD to match the fibers to anything in the FBI database without mentioning that there are only 800 samples in that database, which is kind of relevant, given that there are a lot more than 800 kinds of fiber. Stuff like that.
* The several indicators that there are some internal organizational problems over there, including (inter alia)the resignation early on of two board members (including the chairman) following Leitao's refusal to show them financial records and -- more recently -- the decision of pro-Morgellons OSU neuroscientist Randy Wymore to dissociate himself from the foundation for unstated reasons.
* I was also kind of disturbed to see that the website is fundamentally unchanged from what it was in (approximately) 2005, when I first looked at it. I mean, surely they could have managed to come up with some more photographs to add to the ones Leitao took of her son something like a decade ago at some point in the last four years, come on.
* And so forth.
None of that stuff is incredibly horrible. And some of it isn't even that out of the ordinary. (There's no IRS enforcement to speak of wrt the accuracy of non-profit filings, so they're (unsurprisingly) often not very rigorously filled out.) Still. All of it taken together suggests that (at best) it's not an entity that has the capabilities or resources to responsibly serve as the primary source of information about and/or advocacy on behalf of Morgellons research. Or it does to me, anyway.
So fwiw: Hey, heads up. The Morgellon's Research Foundation -- which is the source of almost all the widely disseminated info on the subject -- has too many discomfiting signs of unreliability and/or lack of transparency for it to be a one hundred percent safe assumption that it's doing a good job in that position. That's just by my standards. I should emphasize. Because I'm not saying I see any smoking guns or anything like that. In fact, I should also emphasize that I don't.
However, I do think that it certainly couldn't hurt to make a habit of looking for unrelated, third-party sources of verification wrt any info that has its origins on that website. Because for whatever reason, it's an organization that's spent the last six or so years making as many people as it can sensitive to the possibility that they've got a problem for which there's no known solution and to which the world in general is so hostile that practically the only place they can hope to find any help is the Morgellons Research Foundation. Where the main (if not the only) form of help on offer is whatever comfort comes from joining a community of problem-having individuals who put almost all their energy and resources into validating and reinforcing their identity as problem-havers while barely even making a pro-forma attempt also to organize a campaign of solution-seeking.
And, you know. That's not really what I'd call an ideal standard of helpfulness. Plus, for whatever percentage of the people who are attracted to it by the media campaigning that either have some other difficult-to-diagnose condition or who are in fact suffering from delusional parasitosis, the separate reality of which it shouldn't hurt to acknowledge, it has a very high potential for turning into the opposite of help.
And the worst part of that is: Based on the available information, however flawed it is, it does look to me very much like what's being called Morgellons does represent at least one serious and unidentified chronic medical condition. And very probably more than one.
So it's kind of dreadful that there aren't really any better options than the MRF. As well as tragic that people with serious chronic and non-imaginary medical conditions can so easily be dismissed as having a delusional disorder. Especially since the most likely upshot of that is that they'll end up taking some gruesome atypical neuroleptic, the benefits of which aren't exactly either universal or free of potentially debilitating side-effects, even for people who actually do have delusional disorders.
Nevertheless. If I were in their circumstances, I wouldn't want my welfare to be either contingent or dependent on an organization with as many risks and shortcomings as the MRF.
It's a sad and dangerous world we live in. Isn't it.
c2w
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23035&p=250745&hilit=morgellons#p250745
Et in Arcadia ego wrote:I spent years, I repeat YEARS, DEEPLY studying 'chemtrails' to the point I might as well have gone to college for a degree. Because Morgellon's is joined to the hip with 'chemtrails'
