CDC to do 1 year study of Morgellons

Originally posted by MurderCityDevil
reply to post by Choronzon

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i hate wiki but it was a quick read

delusional parasitosis?

wtf? thats crazy, i wonder what there findings will be, that is pretty insane

it kinda reminds me of fibromyalgia, there is no real test to diagnose that one either

hmmm

Originally posted by krill
yes i have a few questions that i wouldent mind haveing answers to.

1: are the symptoms constant or do they come and go with out the treatment. and on a scale of 1-10 how sever is the pain level?

**** Ever since I started using the wormer the symptoms gradually began going away. The lesions were very painful as they would constantly form a crust and a deep lump would remain beneath. Once the 'lump' and sometimes with a fiber would cease the lesion heals ..... SLOWLY! The symptoms that I now have that remain are the chronic fatigue, joint pain, an occasional fiber or black speck from my skin ..... increased heat (Summertime) tends to cause itching and a few lesions errupting .... but it's cold here and those symptoms have stopped.

2:where do you live, and by this i also mean wether its urban center or more rural.

**** I live in San Jose, CA. (Northern CA. where the Study will begin ... Oakland, CA.) a transplant from Upstate NY. I had been a very active backpacker/hiker/canoe .... in the Adirondack Mountains as well as here on the West Coast ... mostly family camping as I as married with 3 sons. This is spread throughout the US and Globally. The "hot spots" are here in Ca., Texas, and Florida.

3:please dont take this the wronge way but after you realized something was up how did you go about self diagnosis (not questinig the validity of the claim trust me )

**** Being as I was an ex-Veterinary Technician I knew I had something. When I experienced all of the symptoms I spent hours every day researching what type of parasite it could be. Do you know how many there are? It's insane!!!! That's when I went to the ER and was told I was self-mutilating and wanted attention. Can you even imagine how it feels to ITCH constantly and see nothing? That was the worst for me. My Anti-Nuclear Antibody test was positive which can also be indicative of parasites. The doctors then tell you we all test positive foe that?????

4:does it seem to have a enviromental agitator such as sunlight, smoke, humidity.

**** Yes ... at least for me ... the hot months during the year as I do sweat and that intensifyed the situation. Not smoke, and here in Northern Ca. there isn't much of a humidity issue.

5:and last one i promise, does it seem to be infectious

**** No one knows. But none of my friends or family ever turned away from me at any time. We hug, kiss, etc. My middle son hangs with me sometimes ... sleeps here on and off and he has no signs. I wash our clothes together as well. He's 22. Many families only have one member affected, others more. My thoughts on the families that do share this is that they were all exposed to this together. It is a mystery though so maybe it can be passed sexually, or contact ... I haven't seen any changes in the four years in my friends or family.

[edit on 1/19/2008 by krill]

With their new theory that the fibers could be made of some kind of cellulose, Savely and Stricker, both of whom are on the MRF medical advisory board, contacted Vitaly Citovsky, a plant biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Stricker suspected that agrobacteria, common bacteria found just about everywhere that cause tumorous crown galls to form in trees, were somehow related to Morgellons because agrobacteria like to bind with cellulose. Citovsky studies agrobacteria and its use in genetically modifying plants. It was his lab that showed that agrobacteria can genetically transform any organism, including human cells, by transferring DNA into it.

Citovsky prefaced his interview for this article with, "I'm a normal scientist." He says he was interested in a basic scientific puzzle. "At the time I became involved, I knew nothing of the controversy that surrounds this thing. I didn't know that half the people were crazy. Ninety percent of the stuff on the Internet is absolute lunacy. Government conspiracies, nanotechnology," Citovsky says. "People e-mail me that they have wasps coming out of their skull." Citovsky hypothesizes that Morgellons, like syphilis and other infections, can act on the central nervous system and brain and cause hallucinations.

For his study, funded with $3,400 from MRF, Citovsky tested the skin of five people who believed they had Morgellons and a control group of five people, including himself, who did not. He found agrobacteria in only the Morgellons samples. Then he studied the fibers. Many of them, he says, appear to be polysaccharides, or long sugar molecules, which could be cellulose. And he found they contain traces of metal, such as aluminum. But, like Stricker, Savely and Wymore, he won't be certain what the fibers are until their DNA is tested, an expensive process that the MRF is unable to fund. "To me, it indicates that there is something there. It's not like someone picked up lint from their dryer. But that's all we have," says Citovsky, now a member of the MRF's scientific advisory board.

William Harvey, 70, who serves as chairman of the MRF board, has taken those theories one step farther. He says he became interested in Morgellons research after successfully battling chronic fatigue syndrome and made it his mission to find cures for such unexplained illnesses.

He wouldn't be specific, explaining that he first wants the results of his research to appear in a top-notch, peer-reviewed journal such as the Lancet. "This may be the story of the century," he says. A semi-retired doctor in Colorado Springs who spent most of his career working in space medicine for the Johnson Space Center, Harvey says he may have found not only why Morgellons patients would both scratch and act strange, but also what could be the "genesis of probably most chronic human illnesses," such as autism, obesity, chronic fatigue and bipolar disorder.

It all boils down to this: mutant worms.