Morgellons Disease

Morgellons disease is an emerging disease which is causing a great deal of controvsery in the medical community due to its unusual nature.

The disease came to prominence when the son of biologist Mary Leitao complained of "bugs" in a sore in his lip. The sore refused to heal and Leitao began to notice odd filaments, or fibres, protuding from the wound. Receiving little in the way of concrete help from medical establishments Leitao hit the books and eventually found a reference to a strange disease in an obscure 17th century letter written by sir Thomas Browne. Brown described a condition which affected children, causing coarse, painful hairs to sprout from their backs. He named this condition 'the Morgellons'. Leitao found enough similarities between what was described in the letter and what her son was suffering from and labelled her son's condition Morgellons.

Having been dismissed by every medical doctor that she had visited as "imaginary" Leitao decided the best course of action would be to spread her net wider and attempt to find a sympathetic doctor. She set up a website describing the condition in the hope that this would lead her to someone in the medical community who may have had some experience with the condition. To her surprise she was quickly inundated with emails, not from medical professionals, but from individuals and families suffering from the disease. Quickly realising that this was not an isolated phenomenon Leitao created a foundation to offer help and support to sufferers, to recruit medical professionals to research the condition and to put pressure on the government to launch an official investigation.

Up to now thousands of families have registered with the foundation and a number of senators have become involved which has resulted in the launch of a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) investigation.

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