USA Today reports, “A half-million-dollar study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found no obvious medical explanation for a mysterious and controversial skin disease whose sufferers report a crawling sensation on or under their skin and fibers emerging from it.”
Mark Eberhard, director of the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases, “says the findings are useful in that they tell both patients and doctors that the condition is rare and neither contagious nor environmentally based.”
The AP reports that “the study cost nearly $600,000,” and “its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients’ minds.”
On its website, ABC News quotes CDC spokesman Daniel Rutz, who said, “We saw a growing number of people complaining about these unusual symptoms, and as a public health agency we felt the need to see what was going on. It was important to rule out an infectious cause because a lot of people were concerned about transmission.”
MedPage Today reports that the study was published in the journal PLoS One. The Wall Street Journal “Health” blog and Reuters also report this story.