Since then, with other Morgellons patients, he has taken the examination further and biopsied their skin. But he's seen nothing to suggest that it's a real condition—especially not fibers in the patients' skin. In fact, the only place Craft says he has ever seen the fibers are on Leitao's Web site. From his computer screen, he says, "they look like fibers of fabric and, on occasion, collagen fibers from within the skin. In the biopsies I have taken, there appear to be only normal skin and inflammation, as one would find in a bump that has been picked at."
Lone Voices
While most physicians seem to lean toward the delusional parasitosis diagnosis, there are a handful of people who think there's something real going on here. About a year ago, Oklahoma State neuroscientist Randy Wymore stumbled upon Leitao's Morgellons site and became intrigued. Wymore called Leitao and asked if there were any fiber samples he could look at. Within days, Ziplocs were arriving in the mail from around the country. Though the fibers all resembled one another, he says, they looked like no other synthetic or natural fiber he compared them to. Ultimately, he asked the fiber experts on the Tulsa police department's forensics team to examine them.
First they employed a type of spectroscopy that identifies the chemical structures of fibers and compared them to their database of 800 fibers. No match.
Next they subjected fibers to gas chromatography. Compounds put through this process are encased in a vacuum chamber and exposed to high heat; the temperature at which they reach boiling point is a clue to what compound they are made of. The forensic experts had a database that included the boiling point of 90,000 organic compounds with which to compare the fibers. But the machine ran to its highest temperature, 1,400 degrees, and apart from some slight blackening, nothing happened. The fiber experts were mystified. "The conclusion we were left with is that they are unknown fibers, not simply contaminants from clothing sticking to scabs," says Wymore.
Wymore, who is not a physician, also asked Rhonda Casey, the chief of the pediatrics department at Oklahoma State University Hospital, to take a look at some of the patients for him, to get a medical opinion. "Honestly, when he first told me about it, I thought, they're all nuts," says Casey. But she changed her mind. "There was not one patient I saw who did not look ill," she says. What's more, they all looked ill in the same way, with neurological symptoms, including confusion, foot drop, in which a person loses control of their foot and has trouble walking, and a sagging mouth when they spoke. Many had been diagnosed with atypical forms of neurological diseases like Parkinson's or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease).
She examined their skin via a dermatoscope, a light tool with a magnifying lens. And she did biopsies on both their lesions and apparently healthy skin. She says she saw fibers embedded in both places. The white ones, she says, are hard to see. A dermatologist who either didn't look at all, or didn't use a dermatoscope, might not see them under the skin. But some—the black, red, and blue ones—are blatantly obvious, she says. One young girl had a small pimple on her thigh with a bundle of black fibers just barely protruding from it. Many doctors have accused these patients of embedding fibers in the sores themselves, but Casey doesn't believe it. "As a physician, I can't imagine reproducing what I saw in that little girl's leg."
There's also some evidence of an overlap with Lyme disease. Ginger Savely, a San Francisco nurse practitioner with a long history of treating Lyme patients, now sees Morgellons patients and says 90 percent of them test positive for Lyme disease. "I think that one of two things is happening," she says. "Either there's a co-infection people are getting at the same time they get Lyme, because there are a lot of infections spread by ticks." Or whatever is causing Morgellons is something ubiquitous that many of us are exposed to, but the disease develops only in people with weakened immune systems, like those with Lyme disease.
Morgellons on My Mind
One complicating factor, as even Leitao and Casey admit, is that there are neurological and psychological symptoms that come with Morgellons that make the patients difficult to deal with at times, and make it seem as if they really belong on the psychiatrist's couch. "Patients start to act unusual," says Casey. "They get forgetful. They often have a speech hesitation, and they often have a hard time telling their story coherently." To her, it's not surprising. "The disease affects the brain."
New Jersey psychiatrist Robert Bransfield, who has a number of Morgellons patients, agrees. "They don't start out difficult to deal with," he says. "But when it progresses, it can result in quite extreme paranoia, even delusions." Others have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, and even atypical Parkinson's as a result of their personality change.
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