Morgellons Disease:
"Do we have a 17th century plague or a new one?"
by Jon Christian Ryter(Copyright 2008, Jon Christian Ryter - All Rights Reserved)
 In 2006, a young man in Texas afflicted with Morgellons Disease committed suicide because his doctors would not believe there were things growing out of his skin. "Parasitosis is a classic form of shared delusion," Dr. Mary Seeman, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto said. "Skin disease is [a] perfect [catalyst] for it. A person gets a rash or something, then the disease spreads through any shared space in which there is close contact."
One woman convinced her husband that neighbors were shooting at her with lasers. Another convinced her sister that they were both being attacked by bugs. "When a person has something bother him these days," Seeman said, "they get online {where they] get reinforcement [of their] ideas." And, of course, the conspiracy is born. Mary Leitao, who in Seeman's view would likely be one of the ringleaders of the fiber conspiracy, created the Morgellons Research Foundation website in her home. But Drew Leitao, like most of those who have been-and still are-misdiagnosed, still sees doctors who still fail to believe that the fibers are not related to the illness, which is still diagnosed as eczema.
When Sue Laws of Gaithersburg, Maryland first experienced Morgellons, it felt like bees stinging her back. The stinging sensation was so severe she screamed for her husband. When he checked her back, there was nothing there. She didn't believe him. To prove it, he stuck strapping tape on her back and ripped it off to prove it was nothing. The tape was covered with little red fibers. Only, Laws was not wearing any red clothing. Over the next few months, the itching got worse. And, worse yet, it felt like there were bugs crawling under her skin. Her doctor could not find anything wrong.
The Laws, believing there was some type of insect infestation tore up all the carpeting in their house and sanded the floors.
 Then, suspecting it might be some type of mold, they stripped all the wallpaper and painted the walls. Her condition worsened. Every morning she found black specks on her sheets, and where the specks were on her body, there were droplets of blood. Like the Kochs', her joints began to ache. But, in her case, her hair began to fall out and, for no reason, her teeth began to rot. Then one morning as she looked in the mirror, a pink worm came out of one of her eyeballs. Sue Laws was convinced she was going to die a very horrible death.
It was at that time that she found Mary Leitao's website. The things Laws was experiencing were the list of symptoms for Morgellons. They included the crawling, biting and stinging sensation she had experienced, plus the joint pain, the black specs, the threadlike hairs, the blood droplets, and everything else she had experienced except the pink worm and a springtail fly she coughed up.
New Yorker Christina Doe (last name omitted) decided to "winter" in a rented condo in Florida in 2004. Within a month or so she began to wonder if the home might have a flea infestation. Christina was experiencing what felt like bug bites, and she had a constant, nagging itch. Her Florida friends thought she might have noseeums (a microscopic mite), or chiggers or some other form of mites; and gave her the remedies for all of them. Because the house she rented had a dog and several stray cats that hang around like the place was home, Christina set off bug bombs to kill what she believed was a flea population-eight times.
When she returned to New York, she passed the infliction on to her sister, two daughters and a granddaughter. Like Mary Leitao, her son, the Koches, and Sue Laws, Christina experienced all of the symptoms of Morgellons. The doctor gave her lotions for the itching and the constant stinging sensation. While her sister and daughter-her blood relatives-contracted the disease from her, her daughter's husband and grandson did not.
After a year-and-a-half. Christina discovered Mary Leitao's Morgellons Research Foundation website and realized what she had. But, like every other victim of Morgellons still has the problem.
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