It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
In 2001, Mary Leitao, a Pennsylvanian biology technician, researched the symptoms of her two year old son. He presented with sores on his lip, with protruding fibres. She read a report from 1674, by a British physician, Sir Thomas Browne, who described 'The Morgellon'; a disease which afflicted French children with 'harsh hairs on their backs'. Leitao believed Browne's paper was the closest description of her son's symptoms.
Morgellons disease is barely recognised by main stream medical communities and its cause has not been established to date. It has a variety of symptoms including itchy skin; with crawling, biting sensations, white granules from skin and hair follicles, chronic fatigue, aching joints, anemia, malabsorption and distended abdomen, inflamed lymph nodes, skin lesions and filaments coming out of skin pores. These filaments are the defining symptom of morgellons disease (2). Morgellon disease sufferers often observe activities related to small flies (Table 1). Some describe themselves as being 'saturated' with small larvae and many sufferers report seeing worms coming from their skin. Sufferers often test positive for Lyme disease along with other bacterial and fungal infections. Very few sufferers have managed to find a cure. The correlation between myiasis and morgellons was first (and last) suggested in 1946 by a British physician, Dr Emslie-Smith (87). The term 'morgellons' is likely to have originated from France in the 1600's; derived from the Provencal form of muscula, meaning 'a little fly' (
Myiasis is defined as the infestation of live human and vertebrate animals by larvae of the order Diptera (true flies; i.e., those whose adults have two wings) that feed for varying time periods on the host's dead or living tissue, body substances, or ingested food (1). There are 36 types of fly thought to cause myiasis in humans (20).