2013/10/joni-mitchell-on-morgellons-disease

“It’s a huge tragedy that someone of her talent can no longer sing, but what was truly surprising to me was the revelation that she has Morgellons syndrome. It’s truly courageous for someone as well-known and widely respected as Mitchell to go public about it because people suffering from Morgellons have often been dismissed by the medical establishment as being “delusional.
LAT: You’ve come out in the media as a sufferer of a controversial condition known as Morgellons. How is your health currently?
JM: I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space, but my health’s the best it’s been in a while, Two nights ago, I went out for the first time since Dec. 23: I don’t look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I’ve been through another pandemic — I’m a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as “delusion of parasites,” and they send you to a psychiatrist. I’m actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that’s owed to them.
In the Sept. 15-21 issue of New Scientist magazine, Daniel Elkan describes a patient he calls “Steve Jackson,” who “for years” has “been finding tiny blue, red and black fibers growing in intensely itchy lesions on his skin.” He quotes Jackson as saying, “The fibers are like pliable plastic and can be several millimeters long. Under the skin, some are folded in a zigzag pattern. These can be as fine as spider silk, yet strong enough to distend the skin when you pull them, as if you were pulling on a hair.”
Doctors say that this type of disease could only be caused by a parasite, but anti-parasitic medications do not help.
Researcher Ahmed Kilani says he was able to break down two fiber samples and extract their DNA. He found that they belonged to a fungus.
An even more provocative finding is that biochemist Vitaly Citovsky discovered that the fibers contain a substance called “Agrobacterium,” which, according to New Scientist, is “used commercially to produce genetically-modified plants.”
Source: 2013/11/10/joni-mitchell-on-morgellons-disease/