I Should Not Have Read This Before Bed

"Honestly, I didn't know what to think about the fibers," Tom says. "I knew they shouldn't be there. But they weren't coming off any carpet. I'd watch her pull some nasty, knotty thing out of her arm. She'd work at it and work at it and work at it and pull it out. Now, that ain't right."


Via a link from jezebel I was led to this excellent piece by the Washington Post about a relatively new phenomenon/disease called Morgellons. In the past 5 years or so, people have come to their doctors reporting incredibly painful itching, burning, scabs, and red and blue fibers crawling out of their skin. The insufferable itching has led to lack of sleep and possible psychotic episodes, which has led to loss of jobs, lives, spouses, and children. This shit is insane, forreals.

There are about 11,000 known cases of it in the US right now, none of which have been acknowledged by the medical community. Doctors can't "see" the fibers under the skin, and when it is brought in as evidence, it is dismissed as carpet fibers or house dust and the people are told to see a therapist. Significantly, most of the people who have been outspoken with this phenomenon and have been turned away with their ziploc baggies of mutant skin fiber have been women, rendering this the New Wave Hysteria. HELLO, Freud's "gloved woman," the early 20th century psychosomatic disorder attributed to women who were feeling things that weren't physically "possible." Most of the people who claim to have Morgellons disease are women, but this is thought to be because the people who come forward with it are basically condemned as psychologically unstable, and men aren't putting themselves at this risk in the internet community of admitted sufferers.

Anyway, the article goes on to prove how it's basically impossible that this is some sort of mass-psychological delusion because when a doctor asked for samples to be sent in from known sufferers, he received fiber samples from all over the country, and they all looked fairly identical: magenta and cobalt hard masses of fiber, none of which matched the compositions of any of the 900 known American textiles. You can't mass-delusion mass samples like that. WHOA. RIGHT? WHOA. Gets freakier: one theory goes that it is some mutant worm that hopped its way from Southeast Asia in the 70s into human bodies and across the pond, and when the immune system breaks down, the worm finds its time to shine by edging its fibers out of your skin and crawling across your skull. Some of the sufferers have even pulled worms out of their eyeballs and confessed to coughing up flies and bugs, which have all been dismissed as psychoses due to lack of sleep due to itching due to just some "really bad skin affliction."

anyway read all about this fiber madness here

And WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER GARDENING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Another moral from this twisted fiber tale.

Is it weird how fascinated I am by this? Also I can't stop itching now.