Morgellons Disease: Is It Real?

Painful lesions, creepy crawling sensations, short term memory loss. These have all been heard before when you're dealing with diseases. But what's never been heard before is unexplained, colored fibers coming out of your skin.

These symptoms were first recognized by the mother of a two-year-old child suffering from a mysterious illness in 2002. The mother nicknamed the disease "Morgellons disease". More people began to suffer from this mysterious disease, all of them reporting various symptoms from loss of concentration to joint pain to fibromyalgia.

All the patients reported black granules and fibers sprouting out of their skin. The fibers grow under the skin, and have been reported to be white, black, red, and even blue. They come out twisted into balls or as bundles.

One patient, 36-year-old Deanna Odom, described them to Newsweek as looking like "dust fibers". She also said that when she put her hands together, "they would puff off the fibers". She has recently shown improvement with the disease. There isn't an explanation for her sudden improvement, though.

Many dermatologists don't think Morgellons actually exist. They pass it off as delusional parasitosis, where patients believe they are infested with parasites, or prurigo nodularis, a disease that causes itchy nodules to appear on the patient's skin.

However, in studies, Morgellons-afflicted patients have been shown to be parasite-free. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has begun looking into this disease, with a budget of $545,000. Now that the government has started to look into this disease, will dermatologists start taking Morgellons seriously?