Morgellons Watch

Morgellons coverage in the local media has never been very good, with the natural tendency of TV news to compress things into sound bites, and to force emotional responses from their viewers instead of informing them.

This coverage reached a new low on 3/6/2008 with the broadcast of the KFMB piece titled : “Is Mysterious Skin Condition A Disease Or Delusion?”:

http://www.kfmbtv8.com/features/healthcast/story.php?id=120307#

The majority of the segment is taken up with an interview with a woman who claims she has Morgellons.

Her symptoms began in July with what she thought was an insect bite. It soon evolved into skin lesions.

“One evening I was kind of scratching at one of them, what appeared to be a little white moth flew out of some of these lesions,” she said.

Her terror continues. She says citrus acid brings worm-like threads out of her body. Seeing is believing.

Here’s where things get ridiculous. The woman takes some freshly cut lemon, and rubs it vigorously over her hand for a minute, squeezing and twisting the lemon slice until her hand is covered with lemon juice and lemon pulp.

She then rubs her hands together, rolling the pulp around on her fingertips.

Then she points at some lemon pulp and says “This is worms, can you see it coming out right there?”

Later, with hand dried off, she digs at a piece of dried skin at the edge of a wound - the unsaid implication being that this is the same thing.

The footage then cuts to her plucking off another piece of lemon pulp from a different region of unbroken lemon soaked skin.

The piece continues:

[She] has seen countless doctors, but her symptoms are getting worse.

“To be diagnosed by doctor after doctor as being delusional, it’s beyond frustrating,” she said.

I’m sure it is very frustrating, and I feel very sorry for her. However, little white moths are not flying out of her lesions. The “worms” are lemon pulp. I don’t know anything about her other symptoms, or her skin condition, which may well be related to a real medical condition, but in this regard, she holds a mistaken belief.

If countless doctors are telling someone the same thing, over and over, then is there not a chance that the doctors are right?

Despite the title of the piece, there is no questioning on the part of KFMB. They totally accept this woman’s story. Presenting her as a rational person who simply has worms coming out of her skin and is being ignored by countless doctors. They totally ignore the very obvious fact that there are no worms, and that all they are seeing is lemon pulp.

The following CBS11 report suggests that a “dramatic new breakthrough” in the field of Morgellons was revealed at the recent Morgellons conference:

http://cbs11tv.com/health/Morgellons.Disease.Morgellons.2.689110.html

There may be a dramatic new breakthrough for hundreds of Texans who suffer from a mysterious disease. CBS 11 News was the only station at a medical conference that uncovered new research in the fight to prove Morgellons Disease is real.
[...]
In 2007, Dr. Stricker and experts in agrobacterium studied skin samples from seven Morgellons patients and found the DNA from the bacteria in all seven samples. Now the question is, how are people getting the bacteria in their bodies.

Firstly, this is not new, it’s over a year old. These findings were reported in January, 2007 - over a year ago.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is a very easy explanation as to how the bacteria got in their bodies: catheters. It’s very simple, and hinges upon three facts:

1. The most common cause of agrobacterium infection is from intravenous catheters.
2. Dr. Stricker uses intravenous catheters to treat his Morgellons and late-stage Lyme patients.
3. Dr. Stricker supplied the samples used to test for agrobacterium

It seems then that these agrobacterium infections may not be a part of Morgellons, but are more likely a result of Dr. Strickers’ treatment methods.

(EDIT: See Dr Smith’s response, in the comments section).

UPDATE:

Dr Smith says:

In these patients, agrobacterium was NOT cultured from the patients’ body. The DNA was detected by PCR testing in Dr. Vitaly Citovsky’s lab at StonyBrook. The samples submitted were skin biopsy specimens done on out-patients in the course of routine offiice visits. The patients were not acutely ill at the time and none had an in-dwelling catheter at the time. It is my understanding that 7 of 7 patients with Morgellons tested positive for agrobacterium and 0 of control patients were positive.

Let’s assume that is accurate, and see what other reasons there could be for this group of patients to have Agrobacterium in their skin samples.

First let’s ask what the difference is between the “Morgellons” patients and the control patients. From the Morgellons case definition:

3. Skin lesions, both (a) spontaneously appearing and (b) self-generated, often with pain or intense itching. The former (a) may initially appear as “hive-like”, or as “pimple-like” with or without a white center. The latter (b) appear as linear or “picking” excoriations.

“Self-generated” here means that the patient generates their own lesions by scratching and picking. The medical term for this is Neurotic Excoriations. There is a remarkable similarity between the lesions of patients with Neurotic Excoriations, and many (but not all) patients who claim to have Morgellons.

The control subjects were healthy individuals (lab workers), who did NOT have Neurotic Excoriations.

Hence another possible explanation for this study is that people with Neurotic Excoriations are greatly more susceptible to Agrobacterium infection (especially in the skin), than the general population. This seems very reasonable, as for the lesions to be “self-generated”, it would take constant repeditive scratching for many months. Fingernails get dirt under them. Dirt harbors agrobacterium. The scratching transfers agrobacterium to the skin.

Correlation does not imply causation. The presence of agrobacterium in a group of seven, while being absent in a control group, is statistically significant enough to warrant investigation. The presence of agrobacterium is likely indicative of some factor that the seven patients shared. I’ve given two possible shared factors here: 1) They were all patients of Dr. Stricker, and 2) They scratch their skin far more than is healthy. It is not hard to come up with other commonalities, such as the unusual use of certain medications prescribed by Stricker, or even the equipment and envirionment used to collect the samples.

This post is a response to claims of a “dramatic new breakthrough”, and I simply hope to point out that this is no such thing, but simply a statistically interesting observation that currently indicates absolutly nothing, but perhaps warrants further study.

Indeed it may well turn out that Agrobacterium IS a common infection in patients with Neurotic Excoriations, and this may be a previously undiscovered common complication, which doctors can then treat. Meaning it could actually be a useful breakthrough, but not directly to do with the assertion that Morgellons is a distinct disease.

Does this family have Morgellons….

… and not even know it!?

Recently I stumbled across www.cockeyed.com, and a review of the Eyeclops Bionic Eye magnifier, a toy camera that magnifies live video feed 200x. Here’s what the Rob, the author, said:

One of the things we found out rather quickly is that there are strange fibers all over the place. You probably don’t think that you have any little fibers on your hand right now, but you probably do.

You can’t spot them, but the folks down at the crime lab can, and the eyeclops can.

Strange fibers? That made my antennae go up, but then worst was yet to come:

Here is a red one, stuck to one of my eyebrow lashes. I realize it looks like a curious little worm, inching his way towards unibrow canyon, but it isn’t moving. Boy, that would have been creepy.

It is just a dead little fiber, stuck to a single lash.

Does someone need to call this family and tell them that indeed, it is a worm-like creature that spawned from a genetic mutation by evil scientists? Or just cut to the chase and call out a hazmat team, to rescue this family from years of torment by a mysterious disease plaguing the nation (that has until now been silenced by medical and government conspiracy)?

I wrote an email to Rob, and asked, “If someone told you that indeed, that red fibers was alive and a worm, what would you say?” He responded,

“Well, it wasn’t moving. It was a uniform color. It was a little translucent, and did not appear to have internal structures. It looked like it may have been red gel of some kind. Fibers were on everything we looked at, not just ourselves. Cookies, socks, diapers.”

That made me curious. After using a powerful magnifying camera, Rob asserts that fibers are on everything. In fact, in the article, he says point blank: fibers are everywhere. He seems almost a little pedantic in his response to my question, perhaps suggesting that my suggestion that the red fiber was a living creature was a little silly.

Rob’s article describes what allegedly thousands of Morgellons sufferers see: little fibers. But somehow, the author is able to come to the conclusion that though it looks similar to a creepy little inching worm, the fiber is, in fact, just a fiber.

How is it that one person can see these fibers as just fibers being everywhere, and others see them as an infectious plague, spawned by the tinkering of evil geneticists?

Read Rob’s article about the Eyeclops here.

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsskin0129,0,121752.story

“Many [pyhsicians] consider it a psychiatric problem,” Citovsky said. “However, there might be something that they develop,” he added, underscoring that his laboratory analyses have cracked the chemical puzzle of the fibers.

“They’re made up of polysaccharides, sugars,” he said. “Long chains of sugar molecules. The problem is the people who deny the existence of the disease. They say this is lint or dirt that people find on their skin. But it’s not dirt, it’s not lint, it’s not twigs.

“But on the other hand, it is not a living creature, because some people say they’re worms.”

Citovsky received samples of the fibrous material last year from San Francisco physician Raphael Stricker.

Interesting stuff. I’d like to hear more about these analyses. Some statistics perhaps? Why this constant science via news release?

One wonders what kind of sugars do not melt at 1700F? Perhaps the press should stop repeating those ridiculous claims of non-melting fibers. But which is the real Morgellons fiber? The cellulose one? The non-melting one? Of the new contender, the polysaccharides?

There are actually modern fibers made for polysaccharides. For example, DuPont’s Sorona fibers, a “cotton-like” fiber, using Bio-PDO, made from corn. Click the image below:

Perhaps though this modern fiber is a little too unlikely. What other fibers are made from polysaccharides?

Cotton.

Yes, that’s right. Cotton.

Cotton is made from cellulose, cellulose is a polysaccharide.

Wait, there’s more:

Paper and Tissues

Yup, Kleenex too. Also cellulose, also a polysaccharide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/01/17/DI2008011701435.html