Photos

Morgellons and Lemons

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.

SUNY SEM Morgellons Fiber Photos

There are some new photos on the MRF web site, including this one:

Which is captioned: “Ribbon-like fiber coated with minerals with a cylindrical fiber and faceted fiber adjacent“, with the implication being that this is some unusual fiber only found in Morgellons patients. But let me set this photo in a larger context:

I’ve taken the MRF photo and scaled it to the exact same scale as another (larger) photo. I’ve also taken two more photos and overlaid them to show detail of the “mineral” coated fiber. One image is just to the right of the middle, and the other is in the left. Note all I did here was rotate the images and moved them to similar regions. The images have been scaled to match (note the 100µm and the 10×10µm scales). Note the undamaged fibers are the exact same size, shape and texture in both photos, while the middle damaged fiber almost exactly matches the overlaid segments of damaged fiber.

All images are of cotton. The larger background image is of cotton thread, from here, the second inset image is of a water-damaged cotton fiber from here. Click on the above photo to zoom in and examine the cotton more closely. Note that they have the exact same “minerals” sprinkled over them. And not that the damaged fiber shows damage in the same way as the “Morgellons” fiber. Also the “faceted” fiber could quite possibly be a faceted fiber, like extruded polyester, but could equally well be a slightly twisted cotton fiber, such as those in the lower right.

Hence, the most likely explanation is that these are cotton, from any of: cotton bandages, cotton wool or cotton clothing.

Original images are linked below, click them to see full versions:

Sources:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/bioimage/image/image.htm

http://aic.stanford.edu/jaic/articles/jaic40-02-002.html

December 12, 2007 by Mick West MRF Photos Science

ABC ‘Morgellons’ Medical Mystery

The “Medical Mysteries” series is proving to be quite a money maker for ABC. The New York Daily News reports:

It’s been a challenging summer for the usually dominant ABC. How tough? Reality offerings have crashed and burned. Few are watching reruns of “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives.” But things are looking up. ABC News’ “Medical Mysteries” series, which examines bizarre medical conditions, has turned out to be a real crowd- pleaser.

So it’s not surprising that they would continue to promote the series, and as part of this promotion offer up a preview story on their ABC “news” site, right next to the wolfman, the echolocating blind men, and the women who smell like dead fish.

The ABC Story features Morgellons Patients: Brandi Koch, Anne Dill, Greg Smith and also Mary Leitao, the founder of the MRF, and her son, Drew.

Leitao’s part in the story is interesting, since it explains the start of the Morgellons phenomenon:

Armed with research, Leitao took her son to a doctor at one of the country’s leading hospitals. He dismissed her tale of fibers and wrote to her pediatrician, saying that her son needed Vaseline for his lips and that his mother needed a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

well, you would think that the next logical step in the story would be to explain how she found her son’s fibers were not normal, and disproved all the doctors, but no, we get:

Undaunted, Leitao began poring through the medical literature looking for clues. What she discovered was a 17th-century reference to a strange disease with “harsh hairs” called “morgellons.”

A disease where infants have a fever, and then you rub milk on them, hairs spring from their backs, which you pluck, and the fever vanishes. Nothing to do with anything. Why do they keep bringing this up?

What does Mary say about Drew’s fibers:

“What I saw were bundles of fibers, balls of fibers,” Leitao says. “There was red and blue.” Even stranger, they glowed under ultraviolet light.

I have explained red and blue fibers before. I’ve also explained the glowing (although that’s usually white fibers, which Mary also found, just did not mention in this story). I’ve even discussed the fibers emerging from his lip. There is no evidence at all that Drew had anything at all unusual going on.

Now here’s something I’m looking forward to seeing:

Dr. Greg Smith of Gainesville, Ga., has been a pediatrician for the past 28 years. He claims a fiber is coming out of his big toe, and he has video footage to prove it.

Video footage of fibers emerging is something I’ve been suggesting for a while. The fibers are the only really interesting thing about “this disease” for which you might have a chance of getting some evidence.

The rest of the article is similar to other media articles. Anne Dill (who has a very impressive photo gallery) says her husband died of Morgellons, but he was actually diagnosed with ALS. 4500 people are supposed to have contacted Leitao, when all they did was fill in an internet survey. A doctor says that the lesions form when people scratch themselves.But the real news, and what I suspect that MRF were so excited about before they collapsed, is that the Tulsa City police department were unable to identify some fibers collected from a Morgellons Patient by Randy Wymore:

Forensic scientist Ron Pogue at the Tulsa Police Crime Lab in Oklahoma checked a morgellons sample against known fibers in the FBI’s national database. “No, no match at all. So this is some strange stuff,” Pogue says. He thinks the skeptics are wrong. “This isn’t lint. This is not a commercial fiber. It’s not.”

The lab’s director, Mark Boese, says the fibers are “consistent with something that the body may be producing.” He adds, “These fibers cannot be manmade and do not come from a plant. This could be a byproduct of a biological organism.”

What kind of obscure biological organism produces fibers? Bombyx mori? Rodentia Chinchillidae? Ovis aries? Exactly how extensive is this FBI national database, and how do you check a sample against it? Here’s an earlier mention of the involvement of the Tulsa Police:

The fibers, about the size of small eyebrow hairs, are not living organisms, Dr. Wymore decides. He teams with a Tulsa police department crime lab to sort through fiber samples, and though the lab owns a database of more than 800 fibers, these fibers match nothing.

800 fibers does not sound like very many to me. I bet they don’t have this one:

or this one:

I’ve got more. My point is that 800 fibers might cover 90% of the common household fibers found in your average bit of lint, but there’s still probably over 10,000 other uncommon fibers like the above – lots of room for unidentified fibers. (A prize to the first person to correctly identify the above two photos – they are from a QX5 at 60x, so are about 3mm across).

Here’s a natural man-made fiber (the large one on the bottom right):

I KNOW they don’t have that one in their fiber database. Why? I made it myself, simply by firmly rubbing my upper arm with a fingertip after having a hot shower. Some old sun-dried skin sloughed off, and rolled up with natural skin oil and sebum, forming this fiber-like shape. Everyone has these “fibers” from time to time, not everyone really looks at them with a microscope, or asks the police to identify them.

Here’s a much better article on Morgellons, from the Associated Press:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/15227993.htm

He recruited two Oklahoma State faculty physicians. They tweezed fibers from beneath the skin of some Morgellons patients who visited the Oklahoma State Center for Health Sciences in Tulsa in February, Wymore said, and sent those samples to the Tulsa Police Department’s forensic laboratory.

The police checked the samples against carpet and clothing fibers and other materials, and conducted chemical analyses and other tests. Nothing matched, said Mark Boese, the police lab’s director.

“How it is being produced, I don’t know,” Boese said. He theorized the fibers could be produced by human hair follicles that somehow encapsulated pollutants processed by the body.

I’ve nothing against the Tulsa Police forensic department (although they do seem to be big fans of CSI). But again, all they have said is they cannot identify some fibers, and they don’t think they are man-made or plant fibers. Hopefully more information will be forthcoming, but they have not explained how they have scientifically determined they are “some strange stuff”. What tests were run? What were the results of the tests? The Tulsa police has some nice equipment. Were these tests run with public money? Can we have the results?

Maybe we’ll see more more details on the show. But remember, ABC is here to entertain you, their aim is to build market share. Keep that in mind, when weighing their evidence. Is it possible that there is some less entertaining evidence? How many fibers were looked at? How many of those fibers were simply not entertaining enough?

August 8, 2006 by Mick West Media MRF Photos Science

White Fibers Fluoresce Blue under UV

Hardly rocket science, anyone who has been to a nightclub in the past thirty years would have noticed that white clothing fluoresces blue-white under UV lights (UV, Ultra Violet, Black Light, Woods Lamp, same thing). Particularly white cotton, including the white fibers in denim jeans.

Yet, Time Magazine says:

Dr. Gregory Smith wants people to know it’s not all in his head. According to the Gainesville, Ga., pediatrician, white fibers have been burrowing into his skin for the past two years, making him feel like he’s under constant bombardment from insects or cactus needles. Shine a black light on these fibers and they’ll fluoresce blue, he says, just like something you’d see in The Twilight Zone.

And the Morgellons Research Foundation says:

They are generally described by patients as white, but clinicians also report seeing blue, green, red, and black fibers, that fluoresce when viewed under ultraviolet light (Wood’s lamp).

It all started with Mary Leitao, who “showed the doctor how the fibers glowed under an ultraviolet light”.

So what’s going on here? Why does the MRF and their publicity department not know that practically all white clothing fibers fluoresce under UV light? Why do they keep repeating that their fibers fluoresce as if it’s something special?

If they can’t get that science right, something that is practically common knowledge, then what else might they have got wrong?

Here’s some white acrylic fibers at 200x, with normal and UV lighting.

Not like something out of The Twilight Zone, just normal clothing fibers.

Update (Aug 1st, 2006): For an explanation as to exactly WHY they fluoresce, see here:

www.techno-preneur.net/ScienceTechMag/july06/Fluorescent_brighteners.pdf

July 30, 2006 by Mick West Lymebusters Media Photos Science

Morgellons and Neurotic Excoriations

Television likes to entertain. When you see television stories about Morgellons, they invariably show someone who has horrific open sores on their skin. This is very dramatic, and elicits sympathy for the sufferers, as well it should.

Then, when later in the segment they trot out their “Other side of the Debate”, they imply that the doctors will say “it’s all in their heads”.

The viewer might be confused at this point, since as the patient is obviously suffering from a horrible disease that causes nasty looking open sores, then how can it be all in their heads?

Well, I don’t think it’s all in their heads. But the open sores do not always have an entirely physical cause.

Look at these two photos:

The photos show a woman’s back covered in sores and scars. They are very similar except that the one on the right has less sores and scars.

Same woman, different times? No. Two different women, one of whom claims to have Mogellons, the other was diagnosed with Neurotic Excoriation. Which is which?
Here are the sources of the photos:

http://cherokeechas.com/worst.htm

http://www.dermnet.com – Neurotic Excoriations

Here’s another good example. Look at the scars, and compare them to the Morgellons sufferer.

And here’s a very short article explaining what NE is, the suprisingly high incidence, and the MANY causes:
http://www.aafp.org/afp/20011215/1981.html

I highly recommend the above article, I wish someone could show it to the producers of future news stories on Morgellons before they hurt more people with their misrepresentations in the name of entertainment.

July 22, 2006 by Mick West Media Photos Science

Wymore-Casey Morgellons Letter to Doctors

On the Morgellons research foundation, there is a flashing link that says “Click here for a letter to your doctor!”, which takes you to this page:

http://www.morgellons.org/letter.pdf

This is a two page letter, with the Oklahoma State University CHS letterhead, dated May 15, 2006, from Randy S. Wymore, Ph.D. and Rhonda Casey, D.O., beginning “Dear Practicioner,”

The letter makes some interesting claims, and contains a few leaps in reasoning, and unspoken assumptions. I’ll go over the whole letter and comment on it a bit at a time.

This letter concerns a patient population that manifests a particular set of symptoms we have encountered with increasing frequency, and that OSU-CHS is actively researching. The condition has been labeled as Morgellons Disease and it is unclear if this is a single disease or a multi-faceted syndrome.

What is unclear is if there actually is a patient population manifesting a particular set of symptoms. As has been pointed out several times, including by the Los Angeles Department of health, the “particular set of symptoms” is vague and covers a large number of conditions. The only consistent distinguishing feature, the fibers, has been shown to be simple environment contamination, since fibers are everywhere and it is impossible to keep them out of lesions.

Until recently, most of these patients have been grouped as a subset of the diagnosis of Delusions of Parasites (delusional parasitosis; DOP).

Delusions of Parasites is the mistaken belief that one is infested with parasites. If people simply have lesions, and find fibers in them, they may form the mistaken belief that their fibers are connected with their disease. DOP is a poor diagnosis in this case, and I have often spoken against this.

The Morgellons research foundation seek to characterise their campaign as a fight between two choices, either Morgellons is a new disease, or it is DOP. This serves to increase sympathy for sufferer, as clearly their symptoms (particularly the lesions) are real, and they do in fact find fibers in their lesions. But the reality is more complex. Many of the sufferers clearly have some form of dermatitis artefacta, or neurotic ecoriations, and the causes of those symptoms are many and varied, and DOP plays only a small part in them.

After obtaining careful patient histories and thorough physical exam, we have determined that Morgellons patients have several important distinctions ruling out the diagnosis of DOP.

Like I said, DOP plays only a small part here. So ruling it out only rules out a small part of the possible causes of the symptoms. There are a LOT of other things that need to be ruled out before we can decide someone has a disease new to science.

This population of patients frequently exhibit the following symptoms:

• Distinct and poorly healing skin lesions with unusually thick, membranous scarring upon eventual healing.

A classic sign of Neurotic Excoriations. Dr Noah Sheinfeld, MD, JD, FAAD, says of Neurotic Excoriations: “The erosions and scars of NEs often have irregular borders and are usually similar in size and shape”, “The erosions can heal slowly because of recurrent picking”, “Scars often remain on patients with this condition”, “Patients pick at areas until they can pull material from the skin. This may be referred to as ‘pulling a thread from the skin.’”

• Moderate to extreme pruritis at sites of lesions as well as un-erupted skin.

Pruritis (itching) has many causes. That lesions should itch is not at all surprising. Itching can cause lesions via what is known as the itch-scratch-itch cycle, whereby the patient obtains temporary relief via scratching, but irritates and damages the skin in the process, causing the itching to return later. Eventually the damage to the skin causes lesions to form. The Merk manual says “chronic rubbing or picking at itchy skin results in an “itch-scratch-itch ” cycle that can eventually progress to discolored thickened patches of skin (lichen simplex chronicus) and/or lumps and swellings (prurigo nodularis) that are difficult to treat” – note that “lichen simplex chronicus” sounds similar to the “unusually thick, membranous scarring” that is mentioned above.

• Microscopic examination of these lesions will most often reveal the presence of unusual fibers, which may be black, blue or red. These fibers, which many healthcare providers initially thought to be textile contaminants, are often present in the deep tissue of biopsies obtained from unbroken skin of individuals with this condition. Careful examination of these fibers further reveals that they are frequently associated with hair follicles, and are definitely not textile in origin.

I’ve covered fibers before, demonstrating that fibers are everwhere, and that I personally have fibers on my skin, and in my lesions. I’ve not performed a deep tissue biopsy yet, but I wonder how many Wymore and Casey have performed, and if they did, were the results anything like this:

That’s a deep skin biopsy clearly showing some fibers. They are nerve fibers.

But what of “not textile in origin”? It is unclear how this has been determined, how many fibers have been examined, and what the source of those fibers was. Wymore has simply failed to identify some fibers out of the hundreds he has looked at. He is not an expert on fiber analysis, and even the experts can not identify every fiber they look at. Not being able to identify a fiber tells you nothing.

“Black, red and blue“? Along with clear and white fibers, which are hard to see on skin, those colors are by far the most common in environmental fibers, accounting for seemingly over 95% of all random fibers I have observed.

• Most of these patients suffer from a host of neurological symptoms which can vary in severity from mild to severe. These neurological symptoms include peripheral tingling, paresthesias and varying degrees of motor involvement which appear to progress.

That describes just about everyone over the age of 40. If you were to ask any patient of middle age or above: “have you ever felt any numbness, or tingling”, you’d probably get an affirmative answer. The cause could be anything from very common conditions such as Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, arthritis, diabetes, hypothyroidism or atherosclerosis, to less common, but not unusual, conditions such as a brain tumor, motor neurone disease, or autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis or lupus erythematosus.

• Intermittent cognitive and behavioral status changes are often observed and also seem to progress with the severity of disease. This is often referred to as “brain fog” by the patient as they experience a waxing and waning of this symptom.

“Brain fog” is common symptom of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a MUPS that many Morgellons believers are diagnosed with. “Intermittent cognitive and behavioral status changes” can have many causes, including normal aging.

• Laboratory findings in these patients are variable, but often reveal eosinophilia and elevated levels of Immunoglobin E.

“Eosinophilia” is a blood test result indicating an increase in the amount of eosinophils in the blood. A “wide spectrum of illness” is associated with this. The most common cause in the US is “allergic conditions, including drug reactions and atopic asthma”. Worldwide it can be an indication of parasitic infection, which explains its popularity with some Morgellons believers, who often claim their doctors are too quick to discount exotic illnesses such as parasitic worms.

“Immunoglobulin E” (IgE) is a type of antibody. Some people have elevated levels of IgE, which seems to be related to a higher incidence of allergies, eczema and asthma. One can see some correlation here with conditions that have symptoms that might lead people to believe they have Morgellons.
There is another simple explanation for elevated IgE levels, Dr. Adrezej Szczeklik notes “Tissue injury characteristically results in a marked, transient rise in IgE levels in the blood“. While this is more typically associated with major trauma, it’s quite conceivable that the the same mechanisms come into play when the body is dealing with the persistent healing situation presented by the continually generated lesions, and likely sepsis, of neurotic excoriations.

• Other symptoms of varying severity and frequency have been described, and are included in the attached case definition.

As I’ve discussed before, the case definition is all-encompassing. I fit well within the case definition, yet I don’t have Morgellons.

Morgellons patients differ from classical, delusional parasitosis patients in several areas. They do not respond to antipsychotics,

If they simply had eczema with itching (a perfectly normal condition), and found some fibers on their skin, then antipychotics would not help. Again though, this is not DOP vs. Morgellons. A vast number of conditions could cause these symptoms, many of which would not respond to antipsychotics. Also, this is based on what evidence? Clinical studies, or anecdotes?

and new lesions continue to appear upon complete cessation of manual excoriation.

Again, what is the evidence? I suspect this is based on anecdotal self-reporting by the patients. Actual dermatologists suggest otherwise: “He typically puts a cast over the lesions to prevent further irritation and after four weeks removes it. ‘Guess what?’ he says. ‘The lesions are healed.’”

Due to the sensation of foreign material in their tissue, that has been described as sharp, stinging and/or splinterlike, the patient may have discovered the fibers prior to seeking medical care, and may bring them to your office for examination. Please do not assume that the patient’s problem is purely psychological based on this propensity.

What is being referred to here is the “matchbox sign“. The patient itches, the patient thinks this feels like a splinter, they look at their skin, they see fibers, they assume they are related to the itching, they take them to the doctors. Doctors will not assume these patients are delusional – they will explain that the fibers are lint, they might examine them to verify this. They will only begin to consider a delusional disorder if the patient continues to insist that the fibers are somehow unusual, in the face of contrary evidence. Further diagnosis of DOP may come if the patient insists that the fibers are some kind of organism, based on no evidence.

The “Matchbox sign” alone is not an indication of a psychological disorder. Nancy Hinkle lists twenty common attributes of DOP sufferers, of which the matchbox sign is just one. However, since it IS a symptom of DOP, the physician must take this possibility into account.

Many of these patients may appear skeptical of traditional medical care due to frequent dismissal of their symptoms in the past. The combination of suffering from a chronic disease with distressful symptoms and no known cause or cure can cause some patients to appear anxious or agitated. We encourage you to take the time to carefully interview any patient who may fall into this category, perform any testing you may deem appropriate, and most importantly treat the patient with compassion and dignity.

This last part I fully agree with. These are real people with real problems, they deserve our sympathy, our compassion, and the best medical efforts to help them recover from whatever is causing their symptoms.

July 17, 2006 by Mick West Medical Professional MRF Photos Science

Morgellons Photos

(If you are looking for some free Morgellons-style photos to illustrate an article, feel free to use any on this page, and then there are also many more free photos here)

I’ve been asked several times to explain the dramatic photographs of Morgellons sufferers. Well, let’s take a look at some specific examples:

This is “skin from lesion on back, 60x, with embedded fibers”

Presumably these are the types of “unusual” fibers that Ginger Savely finds in peoples lesions when she looks at them with her 30x radio shack microscope. I can’t really see much unusual about this photo though.

Then we have some close-ups: “Fiber and red spot, 200x, top lit”

And the same, but back lit:

Now that’s kind of interesting. The poster says “large fiber looks like it’s attached to blood spot, possibly feeding. Smaller fibers, babies?”. Sounds like an over-active imagination to me.

There’s a couple more, at 200x:

The poster comments “Fibers look nothing like clothing fibers” “fibers all different sizes”, “red dots – eggs?”, “fiber embedded under skin!”

Interesting photos, don’t you think. They really look like something is going on, some weird fibers embedded in lesions. Is this the evidence the the MRF is looking for?

It’s seems to be of the highest level of evidence they have presented so far.

But I can say quite confidently that this “evidence” demonstrates nothing – in fact it actually hinders the case for Morgellons!

Why such arrogance in my assertions? How can I be so sure?

The “Morgellons sufferer” is me, Michael. The “lesion” was a healing zit on my back, the “skin from lesion” is a piece of scab/skin I peeled off it. The photos are mine, the comments are mine, the lesion is mine, the fibers come from the combed cotton and polyester black shirt I am wearing, plus whatever shirt I was wearing the past few days the scab formed, plus a few streaks of blood and skin fibers.

So, either

A) I have Morgellons, and I am in some deep, deep, denial.

B) Fibers in lesions are not evidence of Morgellons.

Fibers are everywhere, as are the Fuzzballs.

July 13, 2006 by Mick West Photos Science

Fuzzballs

A commenter called “Hugh R Delusional”, challenged me thusly:

Can Morgellons watch replicate bundles of colored fibers? If we fiberites are crazy and the fibers we claim to see are simply textile in origin then any doubter should easily be able to pluck some lint off their clothing or belly button even and see bright blue, red, black and translucent fibers tangled in amongst the lint. […]

If your curious as to what you should be looking for, go to the main page of morgellonsusa.com and the background picture will give you a clear indication of what to expect.

Here’s the morgellonsusa.com picture:

So I got out my trusty QX5 and scrabbled together a few lint balls from my wardrobe. Unfortunately my microscope only does 10x, 60x, or 200x, so I can’t replicate the scale of the above (which looks 20x), but here’s my best effort at 60x

And again at 10x

I think that quite conclusively shows that the morgellonsusa fibers are nothing more that regular clothing fibers.

This whole experiment took me less than 20 minutes.

(Update)

Later I discovered that the Morgellonsusa photo was actually squished and elongated, which gives it that odd looking scale. It’s actually a regular 60x QX3/5 photo. Here’s the original:

This is a tiny little thing, barely a spec when viewed at arms length. Easily not noticable on your skin until you look closely. For scale, here’s a bit of MY fuzzball on a penny, at the exact same scale. Note it’s on the letter ‘E’ of ‘CENT’. Also notice how the colors and the fiber diameters all match the morgellonsusa photo.

I also did bit more digging, for Hugh, and found this bit of lint on the floor of the laundry room:

You see, fibers are everywhere. And this bit of lint shows that they are mostly white, with some red and blue, and the occasional black. I think laundry lint is a pretty good random sampling (seeing as I don’t sort my laundry by color).

July 11, 2006 by Mick West Photos 113

The Trouble with Thrips

Thrips are tiny winged insects, around 1mm (1/32th of an inch) long.

This is what they look like, life sized (on a leaf, look closely):

And here is what they look like under a microscope

Here’s a photo of some thrips that a Morgellons believer found on her skin:

(Compare the one at the bottom left with the one in the previous picture)

Thrips infest plants. A serious infestation can have hundreds, even thousands, of thrips in a plant. Sometimes thrips swarm, they fly, and can land on your skin and bite, which can be painful. They can apparently even create lesions that they can get inside, a condition described as Thysanoptera dermatitis.

So suppose you had a thrips infestation, perhaps just on a houseplant, or perhaps you live in an agricultural area, or you have an orchard. Thrips are tiny (they can easily get through a normal window screen) and very hard to see when they are in the air. If you are closely inspecting your skin, then when the thrips land on your skin, it will be difficult to see where they came from. If you have a fertile imagination, it might look like they have emerged from your unbroken skin.

Now within the Morgellons community, there are mixed opinions as to the involvements of insects in the disease. The opinions fall thusly:

1) There are no insects involved with Morgellons, and people should stop talking about them.
2) Insects are not part of Morgellons, but it suppresses your immune system enough to allow insects to nest in your skin.
3) Morgellons is an insect infestation, the insects either create the fibers, or use clothing fibers to create cocoons, and that’s what we should talk about
4) Insects are part of the Morgellons syndrome, but we should not talk about it, as it will get us labeled as suffering from Delusions of Parasitosis.

In its doctor approved “Case Definition“, the Morgellons Research Foundation says:
“The sensations are at times related to the presence of easily seen insects”

On Lymebusters (the online forum that the MRF recommends), the thread entitled “Morgellons, (collembola?)” sums up the every shifting attitudes of some Morgellons believers.

O
It distresses me every time that morgellons is referanced to insects –such as insects crawling out of the body—this tangent can really confuse those who are trying to understand the morgellon syndrom..I have NEVER, in any remote way, made any observance of bugs-flies-etc exiting my body or crawling underneath my skin…

P
The insect theory can be harmful to us if not presented in the correct manner. I believe there is an indirect connection, phermonally speaking […]

Q
Those that have the insects hatching are suffering a very bad aspect of this – they need so much support and especially to be believed and not rejected.

P
We never told anyone they couldn’t talk about it and I apologize again if it sounded that way. We just didn’t want people to place the main emphasis of this disease’s symptoms on that aspect of it, since that is where our skeptics are getting their ammunition to dismiss us.

Q
But to disarm skeptics, any mention of insects should include the fungal / various causes aspect. Any skeptic that can’t figure out that insects and fungus can be connected is A) not too bright B) has an agenda/sponsor or C) works at UoG

O
I wish to clarify my stance–no doubt that insects can lay eggs and hatch out of the hide-skin-of many animals—

H
My theroey is that the Morg attracts other parrasites. I have personally whatched a fly hatch and fly out of my leg and watched a white furry bug eat its way into my heal,

O
We all have fibers–etc=====or defined as morgellons,some have this manifestation others some other presentation..we can not define it down to say morgellons is caused by this or that—this is what I see–That is what you see–but we all see fibers, right?SOO, I ask, why are the fibers created by so many different things?

Here’s how one of the administrators of Lymebusters (who has posted his own photos of Thrips) explains his own pro-insect belief, and the diversity of what people are seeing.

AH
[…]every time I would get bit by something in the spot where I got bit there would be a fuzzball most of the time they were the color of the article of clothing in the area that that I found the fuzzball in If I was wearing white socks they would be white or if I had something red or blue the fuzzball would be likewise I cant speak for my comrade cult members but I think that the critters that are responsible gather the fibers around them like a cocoon
[…]
And I am not saying that we all have the same thing but there is a common denominator that we all have –and that is Doctors are giving us all a bogus diagnosis that we are stuck with so we unite under the same banner to fight it

(Note that AH is just joking here, when referring to the “cult”, he’s referring to another recent post)

So what is the problem with Thrips?

The problem is the assumption, almost the dogma, amongst Morgellons believers, that they all have the same “thing”. That there is some new pathogen that they all are infected with that causes all of their symptoms. Any new symptom that someone professes to have gets included in the long list of symptoms that are allowed under Morgellons. Anything too outrageous or unique gets explained as a product of a suppressed immune system. Any mental issues get explained as neurological effects of “this disease”.

The problem with that is that they obviously don’t all have the same thing. They have a wide range of symptoms. The one thing they supposedly have in common, the fibers, vary as much as the symptoms. On the question of insects – some have them, and some don’t. Again, some believers explain this as the insects taking advantage of a compromised immune system. But you can explain anything as the result of a compromised immune system.

The trouble with Thrips is that believers unquestioningly accepted that tiny bugs can be hatched in their adult form directly through your skin, if you have Morgellons. If you have Morgellons almost anything can be accepted, no matter how outrageous. The key thing many Morgellons believers want is “to be believed”. By being part of a community that wants to be believed, they support each other, and hence they believe each other, easily glossing over all inconsistencies.

Unfortunately, by believing everyone and everything, some of them abdicate reason, and this gets in the way of them receiving appropriate treatment for their very real health issues.

June 27, 2006 by Mick West Lymebusters Photos

Fibers on CNN

The recent CNN story on Morgellons (text version) was interesting as it focused on Randy Wymore’s examination of fibers, and actually showed his colleges removing fibers from a patient, and looking at them under a microscope.

In absence of any epidemiological studies, the only thing that makes the claims of Morgellons at all notable are the “fibers” that sufferers claim to have emerging from their skin. Now I’ve written quite a lot about this before, basically showing that fibers are everywhere, and that many of the photos of fibers shown can easily be identified as Kleenex, or clothing fibers.

The whole Morgellons case hinges around these fibers, which was the thing that originally got me interested – I think it’s high time that I get back to examining the fiber evidence, starting with the CNN video.

First of all, we have Dr Wymore in a thrift store, collecting fiber specimens from clothing with some scotch tape. The reporter then asks him if the fibers he found from Morgellons patients resemble clothing fibers. He responds “No, not at all, totally different”.

Here’s what Dr Wymore told me, on May 22, 2006:
“You see, we do indeed find environmental contaminants in samples from Morgellons sufferers. Definitely cotton, likely from bandages and cellulose fibers, probably from tissue. But, we are not interested in the contaminants that are everywhere. We take the time to sort through the known fibers to examine in more detail the ones that look unusual.”

So what he’s saying here is that he ignores that fibers he can identify, and keeps looking until he finds fibers he cannot identify. I asked him if he did not think that in any sufficiently large sample of household fibers (laundry lint, for example), there would not be some fibers that he would be unable to identify – but so far he has declined to answer.

Later we have some footage of the Morgellons group examining patients, plucking fibers off them, and looking at them through a microscope. Dr Rhonda Casey, DO, points at a small blue fiber and says “That is definitely not a hair, the blue thing there”.

The fiber she points at looks exactly like standard tiny lint fiber. Probably blue cotton. She carefully take it off, and makes a slide.

“This is what they saw”, the reporter says, and shows this picture:

There’s a blue fiber in the middle that looks like a cotton fiber. For some reasons there are a bunch of other fibers that were not next to the blue fiber before. The clear ones in the middle look like cotton or paper, the large brown ones look like human hairs (at about 80 microns they are the correct size). The very dark lines look like the edge of a large air bubble.

We then see several other images, one of which is clearly a damaged human hair – you can even see the scales.

So what’s going on here? Randy Wymore is finding fibers that look different (to him) from clothing fibers. Well, notwithstanding that it’s almost inevitable that you will find unidentified fibers wherever you look, what might make ordinary fibers turn into the Morgellons fibers?

Let’s take a simplistic explanation. Say someone suffers from something that has symptoms of neurotic excoriations (they pick at their own skin, consciously or unconsciously). They are going to have many open lesions on their skin (forearms and faces being common areas). Now lesions are wet and sticky, so naturally they will have several tiny fibers stuck in them. Lesions also heal, so the tiny fibers become embedding in the new skin.

A few months later, just like a splinter, the fiber works its way to the surface of the skin. It may emerge at the original lesion site, or it may have migrated a few inches over. Is it surprising that a small blue piece of cotton that has spent many months under the skin, now looks nothing like clothing fibers plucked with scotch tape at the local thrift store?

That’s just a theory – but it’s a nice simple theory that explains things without introducing a mysterious pathogen. Occam’s Razor: “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Before claiming that because he cannot identify some fibers, then a new disease exists, Professor Wymore must explain how he has fully discounted the multitude of far simple explanations.

I’ll simplify this to two questions:

1) In any large sample of household fibers, will there not always be some that are unidentified?
2) If a clothing fiber were embedded in the skin for a long period of time, and then emerged, would you be able to identify it as a clothing fiber?

June 23, 2006 by Mick West Media Medical Professional Photos

Photos

Morgellons and Lemons

SUNY SEM Morgellons Fiber Photos

ABC ‘Morgellons’ Medical Mystery

White Fibers Fluoresce Blue under UV

Morgellons and Neurotic Excoriations

Wymore-Casey Morgellons Letter to Doctors

Morgellons Photos

Fuzzballs

The Trouble with Thrips

Fibers on CNN

The Evidence Indicates:

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