Morgellons

Morgellons is the informal name given to a self-diagnosed and scientifically unsubstantiated skin condition in which people report sores on their skin that they believe contain unusual fibrous material. Medical and public health researchers, including investigators at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, examined reported samples and found no disease organism, parasite, or mycobacterium responsible, and identified the fibers as consistently originating from cotton and other ordinary textiles rather than from any pathological source. The prevailing medical view classifies the condition as a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychiatric condition in which a person is convinced their skin is infested despite no evidence of infestation, rather than as a new infectious disease. Studies of affected individuals found clinically significant psychiatric symptoms in a majority of cases, along with elevated rates of drug use and solvent exposure among those studied. The name itself was coined in 2002 by a Pennsylvania mother, Mary Leitao, who rejected a psychiatric explanation for her son's symptoms and borrowed the term from a seventeenth century medical text describing an unrelated childhood illness marked by unusual hair growth. Experts now view the modern phenomenon as an existing delusional disorder whose spread has been amplified by online communities and media coverage rather than as a distinct new disease.