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Parasite, disease—or madness?
Sunday, November 25, 2007
CDC edges closer to investigation of mysterious “Morgellons disease”
By Stephanie Ramage
“Doctors are beginning to listen to us and actually try to help us,” she says. “And that’s really because of the CDC.”
IS IT CONTAGIOUS?
A woman who identifies herself only as Leslie answers the phone for the Morgellons Research Foundation in New York. She’s a volunteer. The foundation, she says, has very little funding, but about 10,000 people subscribe to its newsletter. She also says she has the disease. Like Pickens, she believes it’s contagious.
Three years ago—just about the time that Pickens started itching and broke out in lesions—Leslie’s mother returned from her vacation home in Florida convinced that the place had become infested with mites. A neighbor, she told Leslie, had a dog with some kind of skin problem and had brought the dog over. Later, when Leslie’s mother sat in the chair where the woman had sat, she began itching violently, and felt something bite her repeatedly. She returned to New York and came to Leslie’s house having destroyed all of her clothing and bedding, thinking that this would get rid of what she believed to be parasites.
But then Leslie started itching. And then, so did Leslie’s 15 year old daughter. Her daughter, she says, attends an exclusive private school and she absolutely does not want word to get out that she has a parasite that may latch onto other students, so she won’t give her last name. But, to her knowledge, in the three years that Leslie, her mother and her daughter have had the problem, they have never transmitted it to someone else.
Leslie says she’s only suffered from the skin-related symptoms, the itching and lesions. She has not suffered the chronic fatigue, joint and muscle pain and cognitive difficulties, like short-term memory loss, that plague other sufferers. Her dermatologist has been supportive and even arranged for her to go before a panel of doctors at a medical school.
Those doctors issued a diagnosis with which Leslie’s dermatologist disagrees, but it’s one Kelly Pickens and many like her have heard many times before: “They said it was delusional parasitosis,” Leslie says.
