Morgellons: infection favoring autistics?

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The symptoms and cause of this desease emerging in south Texas, California and Florida are unusual and unexamined enough that some patients say their doctors have refused to acknowlege it as a disease. The shared and agonizing symptoms, however, of hundreds of people diagnosed with Morgellon's desease are hard to ignore. Especially considering that the Morgellan's Research Foundation claims that about 10% of patients identified have an Autism spectrum disorder.

From an article in the San Antonio Express-News:

And from the Morgellon's Research Foundation:


I've always been reasonably healthy, but this has me a bit rattled. An infection, 10% of whose sufferers have an ASD... and it appears people with other neurobiological conditions fare no better. I'd be wont to think it could be a nervous system mutation, but it's correlated also with Lyme disease, and patients who have taken antibiotics for years have shown improvement.

note: this could get gross... as if picking with my skin wasn't bad enough, I could be at risk for painful little nerve extrusions to boot. s**t.

Have a nice day. That little itch you feel, don't worry about it.

Fortunately Morgellon's Disease is just delusional parasitosis, not a real condition.

Heck of a delusion. Here's a link to a description of the fibers, with pictures. They're an unknown form of cellulose, and best of all, they fluoresce under black light. Most people with delusional parasitosis would be content to psychosomatically manifest some red bumps on their arm and call it a day. Secreting an unknown substance that glows in black light seems like an awful lot of trouble, just to get some sympathy out of your doctor.

I would like to point out that it's the fibers that are the constant of Morgellons Disease, not the lesions. The fibers sometimes grow out of otherwise normal skin.

Also, if the number of infected people is just over a hundred, then 10% would be around 15 people. It isn't really a large enough sample size to determine if the correlation with Autism-spectrum disorder is significant or coincidental.

I have just now reported the Morgellons website to snopes.com, which doesn't seem to have anything on this yet. If the good people at snopes write back to me, I will post about it here in this thread. So stay tuned.

Some people pick at their skin, causing open sores. I have seen people who do it. They cannot stop doing it, they keep picking, preventing the sores from healing. Then while they are sleeping, the sore rolls over some fluff in their bed, sticks in the sore, and in the morning the delusional person thinks the fibers are growing out of their sore. And then you can take a photo of this as well in order to make pseudo-evidence.

Yes, certainly. But the bed fluff would not be an unknown form of cellulose that fluoresces under a black light, as I stated in the very next sentence, which you apparently chose to ignore and snip.

I snipped it because I think it of little importance. Bed fluff was just 1 example. There are plenty of other sources where they can pick up fibers of various kinds. Cellulose? That is pretty common. It is found in grass and wood and various plants. haha the mysterious fibers are possibly just fine splinters, or maybe from one of those hemp sweaters.

As for fluorescing under an ultraviolet/black light, that is not particularly impressive. I mean, bloody hell, even rat urine fluoresces under ultraviolet light. It is not that big of a deal. Fibers could have been picked up from anywhere. It is far more likely they were picked up and stuck to the wound rather than actually growing out of the wound.

And on the webpage you provided, if you click the link to More images, the black & white SEM photos just look like parts of dust mites or other types of naturally-occuring mites.

Basically that webpage just has photos of lint and random crap, and there is no evidence that it actually *grew* out of the skin.

Again, they would not be UNKNOWN fibers.

I gather that they're some form of cellulose that branches out in some unusual way (they used a bunch of big words I didn't feel like looking up), and they have ruled out textile products as a source of the fibers.

Also, the newspaper article is somewhat misleading. If you read the info on the website, you will see that only about HALF of the infected people have the lesions. The other half have the fibers growing out of unbroken skin.

Which isn't to say that I am ready to believe whatever these guys say; not by a long shot. That's why I emailed Snopes right about the website. Could be real, could be an internet hoax, could be the scientists involved are sincere but misguided or naive, could be anything.

Snopes sent me an automatic mailing this morning saying they had received my email, but I haven't heard from them since.

They WOULD be so-called "unknown fibers" when the person doing the testing is a crackpot, or is not an expert in material analysis. Rotten fruit thrown into the air is a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) until someone identifies it.


Just because they say it, does not mean it is true. They are acting like they are experts, but in realilty they are probably just some arts students who snuck into the lab with the microscopes at university and found it was fun to pretend to be scientists and post photos of lint and dust mites on the web and claim that it is photos of unknown fibers found only on Mars and Neptune. "I can do science me!"


Yeah, it is called HAIR. Or splinters. Most people just remove splinters with their tweezers and get on with their life. People with morgellons freak out.

I will not respond to this anymore, I have nothing more to add. My point is that there is no real / credible evidence to suggest that it is a real non-psychological disease. The website you linked to is just one of many crackpot sites on the internet, and the photos are just photos of random lint and crap, not real evidence at all. The claim that the fibers are non-textile is probably just simply false, or even if it is true there are plenty of other sources for fibers that are much more likely sources than it growing out of skin.

Humans are capable of saying, claiming, and believing absolutely anything. Religion is proof of that. Furthermore, people have a tendancy to want to believe the most fantastic explanations, and ignore the most likely (but less exciting) explanations.

You added something? The point I originally introduced was that the evidence is possibly a good start but possibly totally bad and may or may not indicate the truth. You've fixated on half of that, saying the evidence is probably bad and probably doesn't indicate the truth. How you think you contributed anything at all so far baffles me. You just say "the unknown fibers are probably wood" and "those scientists are probably crackpots." Well, of course if the research is bad, the conclusions reached are unjustified. Why even bother bringing that up in the first place? It's a given.

"No real / credible evidence" is a reason to go get some evidence, not be lazy and quit.

Whether the sample size is large enough or not, the fact remains that if 10% were on the autistic spectrum then 90% were not ergo the infection (if it is such) favours neurotypicals.
Amazing what a little basic maths can do.

Careful, kitten. The infection is not known to correlate with deafness. Does that mean 50% of the patients with the infection are deaf?

A little basic math can cause a heap of trouble.

*ahem*
>"Believe me, if I just randomly saw one of these patients in my office, I would think they were crazy too," Savely said. "But after you've heard the story of over 100 (patients) and they're all — down to the most minute detail — saying the exact same thing, that becomes quite impressive."

I don't see how you can all say this is a hoax so quickly. I don't quite believe it myself, but I'm not going to past judgement until either substantal research or signifacantly more cases are reported.

Careful, kitten. The infection is not known to correlate with deafness. Does that mean 50% of the patients with the infection are deaf?
A little basic math can cause a heap of trouble.

The difference is, the correlation with deafness is unknown whereas we at least have a rough idea of the autistic spectrum number - we know the percentage. The percentage of deaf patients is UNknown, the % of patients on the spectrum is KNOWN.
The article makes no mention of deafness.
The whole of anything (in this case, patients) is 100%.
10% of them are on the autistic spectrum.
To find out how many aren't all we need to do is make the calcuation t-a where t is the total numbe rof patients and a is the number on the spectrum.
As we know what t and a stand for, we can substuite the letters. n is not on the spectrum so.
t minus a = n
100% - 10% = 90%
90%>10%.
There are less patients on the spectrum than not.

That means the majority are neurotypical ergo if the infection favours anyone, it favors NT.

If the correct basic maths is applied where the only assumption is the physical laws then no, it won't cause a whole lot of trouble. If I throw a dice, it has a 1 in six chance of landing on 2, as there are six possible outcomes, each being a one in six chance then
6 over 6 - 5 over 6 = 1 over 6.

This is where you're going wrong. You seem to think that if greater than 50% of the patients are neurotypical, then the disease favors NTs; less, and it favors ASD people; or, if the numbers are equal, then the disease has no preference.

If half the people in the world had Autistic Spectrum Disorders, you would be right. But the fraction is much lower. (Maybe around six percent?) This is the percentage we compare the sample group with, to determine whether the infection targets people with ASDs. So, since we expect about six percent of any random group of people to have an ASD, but the group of infected people is about ten percent ASD people, the infection is targeting ASD people about 67% more than would normally be expected.

None of this takes into account the simple fact that our sample size is so small, the margin of error on these statistics must be huge. The whole thing could just be a fluke. We'd need to get a few thousand infected people to study before we could find real statistics on this matter, anyway.

Hooray for healthy skepticism!

I never heard from the Snopes people, and there's still no mention of any of this on their site. I would think that this'd be right up their alley--even if it's fake, there's still lots of gross pictures and strange stuff to link to. Maybe I should try again... or maybe someone else would like to try?