Fight for answers over mystifying skin disease continues

By JANET ST. JAMES / WFAA-TV

After a recent News 8 report on a mysterious skin condition that some call a plague, hundreds of calls and e-mails were generated searching for answers about the illness.

While a cluster of cases are reported to be in North Texas right now, most doctors believe the painful illness, called Morgellons Disease, is psychological.

However, Morgellons Disease isn't the first illness to meet critical doubts.

"If I could have performed an amputation to willingly get rid of the pain, I think I would have willingly cut my leg off," said Judy Johnson, a Fort Worth Morgellons Disease patient. "It hurt that bad."

Johnson described her illness as a torture that left hundreds of scars on her legs.

It wasn't until she saw the News 8 report that she said she realized she had Morgellons.

"I thought terrible ... that other people were suffering through this at the same time, but relief to know that I'm not crazy," she said.

Crazy, mentally unbalanced and parasitosis are all terms given to people who claim they suffer from the bizarre and mostly unknown sickness.

Morgellons looks like a staph infection; but under a microscope, tiny fibers of different colors pop out of painful, itchy sores.

"When it hits, it just feels like something's crawling all over me," she said. "And when it hits, it just feels like something's crawling all over me."

Johnson said she has no clue how she got it. Like most other sufferers, she also said she has been to many doctors without getting a diagnosis, much less treatment.

It's a runaround Kirt Love said he remembers well.

"Which basically means it's all in your head and you willed yourself sick," Love said of what people said to him when he described his pain.

Like Johnson, no one could explain what was wrong with him.

"Food was like broken glass and water was like battery acid," he said.

He's not talking about Morgellons though; instead he suffers from Gulf War Syndrome.

After 18 months in the Persian Gulf, Love returned with a litany of health problems.

"Shortness of breath, tightness in the chest, dizziness, loss of color vision, you know everything kind of went grey on me," he said.

For years, doctors, scientists and the federal government claimed Gulf War Syndrome was also psychological. The illness is now linked to nerve gas exposure.

"Without the science, the government would still be saying this is not to be taken seriously," said Jim Binns, committee chairman.

It took more than a decade for the government to create the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses.

But as with Gulf War Syndrome, recognizing emerging illnesses takes frustrating time.

"That's the hardest thing to accept in this one, you've got to rescue yourself," Love said as advice to those with Morgellons.

Johnson said she will never give up trying to find relief from the disease that torments her.

"I would like to have some research and I'll volunteer to be a test subject," she said.