Morgellons disease affects 3.65 people out of 100,000 according to the US Center for Disease Control (CDC). According to an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology in 2018, “It is a rare and unexplained skin disorder whose specific etiology remains a mystery.” In other words, it is a disease about which nothing is known . And it is not new: it has been referenced for 300 years.
The name comes from a letter written in 1674 by the English doctor Thomas Browne, where he briefly describes a skin disease in French children : “The hairs that have amused me the most have not been on the face or the head, but on the back. , and not in men, but in boys, as I observed long ago in that distemper endemic to little boys in Languedock, called Morgellons, who suffered from severe abrasions with coarse hairs on their backs.”
Black-headed worms under the skin?
The first reports of this disease speak of hairs, worms with black heads or comedones that protruded from the skin, mainly on the arms, legs and back. The debate focused on whether they were animate or inanimate beings : while the German doctor Michael Ettmüller argued that he had seen beings similar to scabies mites, the famous Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek concluded that they were inanimate objects. The first monograph dedicated to this strange disease was published in 1674 by a certain Velshius and entitled De vermiculis capillaribus infantium .
At the end of the 19th century , the idea began to spread that it must have some psychological component: in 1894 the name acarophobia was proposed for this disease and in 1946, JW Wilson and HE Miller suggested that it would be more appropriate to designate it as “delusions of parasitosis” .
During the first half of the 20th century, it was considered a psychiatric disease , despite the fact that patients had been found to have other parallel conditions, such as spirochete infection (syphilis is among the diseases caused by this type of bacteria). Swedish neurologist Karl-Axel Ekbom published in 1938 a decisive study for the understanding of this rare disease. He thought that under the delusion of parasitosis there could be some biochemical component working , because “perhaps it is too simple to think that parasitophobias are a mental illness and nothing more”. Ekbom described that patients had skin sensations that were mainly itchy, but also as if something was crawling on or under the skin, and that stinging sensations could occur. Patients sometimes brought samples of these ‘little animals’ to doctors, which were actually “little hairs, tiny threads, grains of sand and flakes of skin” . On the other hand, he pointed out, apart from the feeling of being infested with bugs, no other mental problems appeared. In the examinations of his patients, Ekbom did not find any type of arthropod, parasite or any other microscopic animal, but he did find hairs, “small threads” and “grains of sand”.
an unexplained illness
In 2006 the CDC conducted a large study across the country, identifying 115 patients who suffered from this dermopathy. At the press conference called two years later to release the results, lead researcher Michele Pearson said: “What I can claim as real is the suffering that these patients are experiencing, but I cannot characterize this as a syndrome or a disease, I can only tell you that it is an unexplained disease .”
In January 2012 the CDC published the results of their study. Their conclusions suggest that it is a psychological illness: 59% of the subjects had cognitive deficits, 50% had used drugs and 78% reported having been exposed to solvents (potential skin irritants). No parasites or suspicious bacteria were detected in the samples collected, and most of the materials collected from the skin of the participants were cellulose, probably of cotton origin.
But a study published in 2016 in the International Journal of General Medicine affirms the opposite: the ‘hairs’ are filaments of keratin and collagen , and defend that we are facing a disease associated “with an infection transmitted by ticks”. In fact, they found “spirochetes genetically identified as Borrelia burgdorferi in the majority of Morgellon s skin samples studied so far.” That bacterium is responsible for Lyme disease, which is transmitted by ticks and is found in rats, squirrels, guinea pigs, deer and elk.
There is no consensus within the medical community on the origin of this disease; worse still, there isn’t even it in what it really is . In situations like this, conspiracy theories fly. So it is not surprising that there is talk of aliens, chemtrails or bioterrorism. Or as a doctor from New Mexico explained on the radio program Coast to Coast: an ex-CIA agent had told him that it was a disease caused by the French…
Reference
Fair, B. (2010) Morgellons: Contested illness, diagnostic compromise and medicalisation, Sociology of Health & Illness. 32 (4): 597–612. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01227.
