Reply With Quote
oops!
That was supposed to go in the club...
Doctors puzzled over bizarre infection surfacing in South Texas
Web Posted: 05/11/2006 11:22 PM CDT
Deborah Knapp
KENS 5 Eyewitness News
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.
oops!
That was supposed to go in the club...
I'm sleeping very well thank you...Kind of like Kevin Garnett through those long playoff commercials on TV...
Uh, where's the link to the story? I went to mysa.com and couldn't find it...
Don't believe everything you read on the internet...
If this was real, don't you think someone would have footage of it by now?
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/w...se_is_it_real/
and I don't mean images like this:
http://www.morgellons.org/images.html
That could be anything!
Um, like Blackheads....
http://www.morgellons.org/symptoms.html
Last edited by MadDog73; 05-12-2006 at 09:32 AM.
It's there, but buried.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/med....32030524.html
It's also May, which means Sweeps, which means "Sensationalism, here we come!"
Thanks. Did you listen to the interview http://mysa.vo.llnwd.net/o2/audio/KE...morgellons.mp3 ?
Yep, a blue worm that lives in your scalp. No wonder these people are crazy, their brain is being eaten by blue worms...
Ok a Google search for Ginger found out she's legit.
http://www.ilads.org/nurse_prac ioner.html
So what's up? Did she really see this? Is she trying to make money off these people?
More than you ever wanted to know: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=587200
This is really interesting. This could some sort of advanced infection from Lyme disease. But, I remain skeptical until someone captures these symptoms on video - I want to see the blue worm weaving in and out of someone's skull, damnit!
Last edited by MadDog73; 05-12-2006 at 09:57 AM.
thats ed up.
very scary, really.
and sick.
oh god! the images!
Those images could be anything blown up at high magnification.
I mean, I hate to freak you out, but there are bugs right now living in your skin. They are very small, and don't hurt, but they are there.
Just like there are dust mites living in our carpet....
sometimes it's best not to know what's out there!
hmmm...as a horse owner, that verbal description in the article almost sounds like the symptoms of bot fly larvae...
I admit I'm biased, but if this were something real resulting from an infection, it should be relatively easy to prove, even if they couldn't say what the source was. Examination of the skin lesions, skin biopsies, skin cultures, and examination/culture of whatever the "worms" are.
If you do a MEDLINE search, this is the only reference (out of millions) that even mentions it, just published this year:
There are people out there who could make their academic careers by proving the existence of a new disease, and nobody seems to be biting.1: Am J Clin Dermatol. 2006;7(1):1-5. Related Articles, Links
The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion?
Savely VR, Leitao MM, Stricker RB.
South Austin Family Practice Clinic, Austin, Texas, USA.
Morgellons disease is a mysterious skin disorder that was first described more than 300 years ago. The disease is characterized by fiber-like strands extruding from the skin in conjunction with various dermatologic and neuropsychiatric symptoms. In this respect, Morgellons disease resembles and may be confused with delusional parasitosis. The association with Lyme disease and the apparent response to antibacterial therapy suggest that Morgellons disease may be linked to an undefined infectious process. Further clinical and molecular research is needed to unlock the mystery of Morgellons disease.
PMID: 16489838 [PubMed - in process]
Well-known in Mexico and the Caribbean, almost unheard of in the USA.
Botflies lay their eggs on mosquitoes. The mosquitoes bite humans and inject the eggs. The eggs hatch and the larva crawl around in the flesh, feeding on the human. They have a little airhole. The black specs could be their feces.
After 6-8 weeks, they eat their way out, but sometimes they might die in the skin and set up an infection.
At least it's something new, so I don't have to hear about the bird flu for the millionth time.
Doctors sometimes are very skeptical of their patients, because this is America, and there are a lot of people who make up mysterious "diseases" so they can get disability and get paid for doing nothing, which after all is the American dream.
But this does sound a lot like human botfly. Go down to Monterrey, Mexico, and the doctor can rub some Vaseline on the lesions, then get a pair of tweezers and pull out the larvae, which may be up to 2 cm long and 1 cm thick, each.
Botfly may be uncommon in the U.S., but it is not unknown and is certainly not a mysterious disease. The simplest google search yield multiple pictures of human bot fly wounds from exotic places like the University of Nebraska. People returning from travel to Central and South America have presented with it in places like Vienna and New York and the diagnosis can be readily made.
Obviously if this is a real disease, a parasite is logical culprit. Any competent dermatologist or infectious disease specialist would at least consider the diagnosis, and make the appropriate diagnostic procedures to detect it. I doubt that the problem is that nobody has thought of it, the problem seems to be that no one can actually confirm the lesions on a patient.
I think Scully had this on one of the X-Files episodes.
I did a search on the researcher it mentioned in the original article, Randy Wymore. Here is an article I found from October 2005.
http://centernet.okstate.edu/whatsne...2005/1005.html
In the world of bizarre symptoms that mark Morgellons disease, patients speculate about how they got it.
An athletic young swimmer who trained in murky bay waters wonders if that is the cause of symptoms. A patient living near a marsh speculates that contaminated dust from dredging is to blame. Others suspect a link to Lyme disease. Whatever the cause, they are sick and do not know why.
Morgellons disease, a little-known and often discounted illness, lacks the solid scientific data needed to point to a definitive cause.
That soon may change as Randy S. Wymore, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology, looks for answers. He is taking on the research challenge as volunteer director of research for the Morgellons Research Foundation.
According to the foundation, the disease began to appear in 2002. Patients complain of itching and feeling like bugs are crawling on their skin, stinging and biting. Many suffer from fatigue, or have trouble concentrating. Even more horrifying, their skin often develops blistering lesions that shed black seed-like particles, and sprout colored, fibrous filaments.
Neurological symptoms include numbness, tingling, itching, burning, or peripheral neuropathy. Sufferers sometimes are diagnosed with delusions of parasitosis (a belief that they have parasites) by skeptical doctors who have no solid scientific data that Morgellons Disease is real. Treatment may consist of saying, “Just don’t scratch it.”
“Health care providers are shooting in the dark as to how to treat it. Antibiotics seem to help some, but if they are stopped the symptoms come back,” Wymore says. In coordinating research efforts, he sees a research challenge and a chance to help. “I am doing this partly from scientific curiosity, but also with real empathy toward sufferers.”
The foundation has registered approximately 2,500 families worldwide. Clusters of sufferers are located in Texas, California and Florida. Wymore says Oklahoma has at least a dozen possible cases.
Questions surround Morgellons. Is it a real disease, and if so, what causes it? Is it one disease, or a complex syndrome?
“We are keeping every possible cause open for examination. It could be viral, parasitic, fungal, bacterial, or environmental contamination. We just do not know. There is not enough evidence,” Wymore says. He will put together a scientific advisory board, and hopes to interest other researchers in unraveling the medical mystery.
To find the cause, he will look first for any new or unusual bacteria. Shed materials from patients will be analyzed for unusual microbial species by amplifying any non-human DNA. Wymore says he will use PCR to amplify DNA, analyze the sequence and get an idea what kind of microorganism, if any, exist.
If no organism emerges, he will look for a viral cause. Wymore says this initial investigation will attempt to establish a rationale for more involved studies. After approval by the Human Subjects Ins utional Review Board, samples will come directly from patients in a clinical setting.
Ok. I might not be making that south Texas trip after all this summer.
getcha a couple cans of these and you will be fine....
Sounds like an under skin worm type of parasite.
LSD.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
