The Wall Street Journal-20080117-Kaiser to Lead Skin Study
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Kaiser to Lead Skin Study
Associated Press
ATLANTA -- It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you.
Some experts believe it is a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it is a true physical condition. It is called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is paying California- based health-care giant Kaiser Permanente $338,000 to test and interview patients suffering from Morgellons symptoms. The one-year effort will attempt to define the condition and better determine how common it is.
The study will be done in northern California, the source of many of the reports of Morgellons (pronounced mor-GELL-uns). Researchers will begin screening for patients immediately, CDC officials said. A Kaiser official expects about 150 to 500 study participants.
Morgellons sufferers describe symptoms that include sores, fatigue, the sensation of bugs crawling over them and -- perhaps worst -- mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. They have documented their sufferings on Web sites.
Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.
In the study, volunteers will get blood tests and skin exams, as well as psychological evaluations, said Michele Pearson, who leads a CDC task force overseeing the study. Dr. Pearson suggested that the study will help determine if Morgellons is the same as delusional parasitosis or something new.
Study participants will be drawn from Kaiser's 3.4 million health- insurance customers living mainly in the Sacramento and San Francisco areas and as far south as Fresno.
CDC officials conceded the study is limited and the results won't give a complete picture.
The CDC has been getting more than a dozen calls a week from self- diagnosed Morgellons patients for well over a year, and was urged to investigate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and others.
Some say they have suffered for decades, but the syndrome did not get a name until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from a medical paper dated 1674 that described similar symptoms.
