Jan
27

Study of freakish mystery illness finds no cause (AP)

ATLANTA ? 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-uns) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sores, 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 on 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,” Eberhard said.

Roughly 100 agreed to at least answer survey questions, and about 40 consented to a battery of physical and psychological tests that stretched 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 ailments, 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.

But 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 comment on 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 study participants 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

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120126/ap_on_he_me/us_med_cdc_morgellons_study

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Jan
21

More Americans Practicing Safe Sex, CDC Reports (HealthDay)

THURSDAY, Jan. 19 (HealthDay News) — The number of Americans who practice behaviors that put them at risk for HIV infection has declined significantly, federal health officials reported Thursday.

The ranks of those engaging in a risky sexual or drug-related behavior dropped from 13 percent of men and 11 percent of women in 2002 to 10 percent and 8 percent, respectively, in 2010, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Generally, these are behaviors that are studied in higher risk populations, but by looking in the household population we can get a better sense of the level of risk that may exist in the general population that you don’t normally think about,” said report author Anjani Chandra, a health scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Some of the risk factors the researchers looked at were gay and bisexual sex, illicit drug use and having several sexual partners or a partner who injects illegal drugs, she said.

“For women, we don’t really see that the decline is due to any variation in sexual risk behaviors, whereas for men we see substantial difference by race,” she said.

The reasons for the decline in risk behaviors is not clear, Chandra said. Some of the public health messages might be getting through. It also could be that people are reluctant to disclose that they engage in risky behaviors, she said.

“But, it could be real and reflect actual changes in behavior,” she said.

The data in the report was collected on almost 23,000 men and women aged 15 to 44 in households throughout the country and represents 6.5 million men and 4.9 million women.

The decline seems to be due to a drop in risky behaviors such as having unprotected sex and having sex with multiple partners, Chandra said.

There were, however, differences in behaviors in different groups. For example, men who had recently been in prison were more likely to report engaging in one or more HIV risk behaviors, compared with other men, the researchers found.

There were also significant variations based on race and income level, they reported.

Sixteen percent of young black men ages 15 to 24 reported at least one HIV risk-related sexual behavior, compared with 8.7 percent of Hispanic men and 6.5 percent of young white men. Poorer men were also more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

The HIV risk in households is not something one usually thinks about when one thinks about HIV risk, Chandra said.

“In household populations, where you may think these behaviors are nonexistent or very rare, they are occurring and they may be placing people at risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases,” Chandra said. “Just focusing on high-risk populations may not take care of the concerns that we have.”

Dr. Sten Vermund, director of the Institute of Global Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, said that the data used was “a highly valid sample of the American population.”

Both sexual and drug-related risk behaviors declined in the study period, and that is a positive trend, he said.

“Risk behaviors remain high and the likelihood of encountering an HIV-infected person has never been higher,” Vermund noted. “Nonetheless, there is a strong indication that prevention programs are working or cultural norms are shifting, or both.”

Philip Alcabes, an associate professor in the School of Health Sciences at Hunter College/City University of New York, is critical of the report as another example of how the government still avoids the real problem of HIV.

“What a waste of time and taxpayer dollars,” he said. “Having failed to advocate for structural changes that would actually reduce risk of HIV acquisition and having failed to implement widespread, easily accessible syringe exchange programs, federal agencies instead spend their time studying personal behavior. It’s a shame.”

“Even though our officials don’t have a clear concept of what really happened 30 years ago, they are still looking at AIDS through the same moralizing lens that was common in 1981. That’s sad, and disturbing,” he said.

More information

For more on HIV/AIDS, visit the AIDS.gov.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/aids/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20120119/hl_hsn/moreamericanspracticingsafesexcdcreports

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