Study of disease inhuman mystery found no cause

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FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin purpose do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File) FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin purpose do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, leader) eval ("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval ("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval ("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP)--Imagine having the feeling that tiny bugs are crawling on your body, that you have oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin. Sound like a horror movie? Well, at one point several years ago, government doctors were getting up to 20 calls a day from people saying they had such symptoms.

Many of these people were in California and one of that state's U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, asked for a scientific study. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons.

The study cost nearly $600,000. Its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds.

"We found no. infectious cause," said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team.

The study appears in PLoS One, one of the Public Library of Science journals.

Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-one) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sori, crawling sensations on their skin and - perhaps worst of all — mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some say they've suffered for decades, but the syndrome wasn't named until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.

Afflicted patients have documented their suffering on websites and many have vainly searched for a doctor who believed them. Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.

Last May, Mayo Clinic researchers published a study of 108 Morgellons patients and found none of them suffered from any unusual physical ailment. The study concluded that the sores are many of them were caused by their own scratching and picking at their skin.

The CDC study was meant to be broader, starting with a large population and then went looking for cases within the group. The intent was to give scientists a better idea of how common Morgellons actually is.

They focused on more than 3 million people who lived in 13 counties in Northern California, a location chosen in part because all had health insurance through Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, which had a research arm that could assist in the project. Also, many of the anecdotal reports of Morgellons came from the area.

Culling through Kaiser patient records from July 2006 through June 2008, the team found - and was able to reach — 115 who had what sounded like Morgellons. Most were middle-aged white women. They were not clustered in any one spot.

That led to the finding that Morgellons occurred in roughly 4 out of every 100,000 Kaiser enrollees. "So it's rare," said Eberhard.

Roughly 100 agreed to at least answer survey questions, and about 40 consented to a battery of physical and psychological tests that clay over several days.

Blood and urine tests and skin biopsies checked for dozens of infectious diseases, including fungus and bacteria that could cause some of the symptoms. The researchers found none that would explain the cases.

There was no sign of an environmental cause, either, although researchers did not go to each person's house to look around.

They took fibers from 12 people, which were tested at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Nothing unusual there, either. Cotton and nylon, mainly - not some kind of organism wriggling out of a patient's body.

Skin lesions were common, but researchers concluded most of them were from scratching.

What stood out was how the patients did on the psychological exams. Though normal in most respects, they had more depression than the general public and were more obsessive about physical branch, the study found.

However, they did not have an unusual history of psychiatric problems, according to their medical records. And the testing gave no clear indication of a delusional disorder.

So what do they have? The researchers don't know. They don't even know what to call it, opting for the label "unexplained dermopathy" in their paper.

Purpose clearly, something made them miserable. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," said Felicia Goldstein, an Emory University neurology professor and study co-author.

She said perhaps the patients could be helped by cognitive behavioral therapy that might help them deal with possible contributing psychological issues.

The study is not expected to be the last word on the subject.

Among those with additional questions is Randy Wymore, an Oklahoma State University pharmacologist who for years was the most reputable scientist to look into it and who has concluded Morgellons is not a psychiatric disorder.

On Wednesday, Wymore said he had not seen the CDC paper and was unable to how we it. But when the study began, he questioned whether Kaiser patients with Morgellons would participate, especially if they were unhappy with how they were previously handled by their Kaiser doctors.

"There is always the question: How many of the participating study actually have Morgellons Disease?" he said, in an email.

The CDC is not planning additional study, however. The agency's expertise is in infectious diseases and environmental health problems, and the researchers saw no. evidence of that.

"We're not mental health experts," one CDC spokeswoman said.

___

Online:

PLoS One: http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Associated Press

Source AP

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Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery

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Before he became a Professor of literature at Harvard, and way before he wrote his classic Shakespeare biography, Will in The World, Stephen Greenblatt was an I'll-read-anything kind of kid. One day, he was standing in the campus book store, and there, in a bin, selling for ten cents (good price, even in 1961) he noticed a thin, little volume called On the Nature of Things, by a Roman writer named Lucretius.

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Lucretius, circa 55 B.C.

When he opened it, he found a description of how the universe came to be. Because Lucretius lived a couple of generations before the birth of Jesus, Stephen was expecting a tale of how gods, goddesses, earth, air, fire and water and an assortment of miracles created everything we see, but as he turned the pages, he says "his jaw dropped" and "his head began to burst open," because Lucretius' creation story doesn't feel remotely ancient. First of all, it's a radically secular account, ignoring gods, goddesses, heaven, hell, life after death, and intelligent design, but more surprising, its logic is eerily, almost spookily modern.

Early Atomic Theory

As Greenblatt describes it, Lucretius (borrowing from Democritus and others), says the universe is made of an infinite number of atoms ...

... moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. ... There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.

All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing — from our own species, to the planet on which we live, to the sun that lights our day — lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal ...

Not only did Lucretius write this more than 2,000 years ago, somehow his book managed to survive the fall of Rome, the burning, looting and desecration of the great libraries, a thousand years of cold storage in medieval monasteries where bookworms, censorship and erasures were common, so that at one point, maybe three — that's all, three — copies were in existence — and yet, says Stephen, On the Nature of Things emerged to become one of the most radical and talked about essays of the post-Renaissance, a favorite of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Jefferson.

Mystery Man?

Who was this Lucretius? Where did he get his radical ideas? How'd his dangerous book make it through? Greenblatt gives us his answers in his new detective-story/history which he calls, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

If I've piqued your interest, you can go to the top of this page and press the "Listen" button, where you will hear my conversation with Professor Greenblatt broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition. There you will meet the unlikely hero of this tale, a young man, who, when he wasn't trying to gouge out the eyes of his fellow secretaries at the Vatican, turned out to be a pretty lucky book hunter. Without Poggio Bracciolini, nobody today would be reading Lucretius.

The details await you (and I hate being a tease here, I know a lot of you come to this site to read, not to listen), but remember this is National Public RADIO — so just this once, hit the button and listen.

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Gamers Solve Stubborn Viral Mystery: The Shape Of A Key Enzyme

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A screenshot from the Foldit puzzle for an enzyme found in HIV-like viruses.

UW Center for Game Science A screenshot from the Foldit puzzle for an enzyme found in HIV-like viruses.

See, Mom? Playing online video games can pay off.

An online group of gamers has correctly deduced the structure of an enzyme that AIDS-like viruses use for reproduction. By playing the online-game Foldit, the group figured out the structure of an important viral protein that has baffled scientists for more than a decade.

The enzyme is a retroviral protease and plays a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and proliferates. Gamers, who weren't experts in viruses, solved the puzzle in just three weeks.

 

X-ray crystallography, the gold standard for protein structures, verified the result. The findings were published online by the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Biochemist Firas Khatib believes the data will help researchers develop better antiretroviral drugs and show that Foldit can help solve thorny scientific mysteries.

More than 600,000 people have played Foldit since it was rolled out in 2008 by researchers from the University of Washington. "The game is like Tetris on steroids," Foldit co-creator Zoran Popovic tells Shots.

Gamers start with a protein that looks like a necklace. Instead of beads or pearls, amino acids hang from the strand. The game challenges players to manipulate the structure of the protein so that it reaches the lowest energy state, which earns them the highest score. The function of the protein changes with the shape it takes.

Gamers bring a different viewpoint to the table when it comes to solving scientific puzzles: freedom from scientific convention. "Humans can outperform the computers when you have to make a drastic move in order to get to the correct answer," Khatib says.

Sometimes to get to the right answer, a drastic or seemingly illogical decision has to be made. But a computer trying to solve a problem won't make an illogical decision that leads it down the wrong path because it can't always see that far ahead, the researchers say.

Scientists sometimes have related but irrelevant information flying around their problem-solving process that can blind them to unusual solutions. Gamers don't have the restrictions that scientists and computers impose upon themselves.

Khatib hopes that the gaming technology will catch fire with other scientists. "Citizen science can actually help solve unsolved scientific problems," he says.

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