Disease in South Texas

It's not a new disease. It's an old disease newly discovered. And it's gruesome.

WorldNetDaily reported today that there's a mystery disease in South Texas.

To the concern of medical professionals already preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic, a mysterious disease first documented 300 years ago is spreading throughout South Texas.

Morgellons disease has not been known to kill and it doesn't appear to be contagious – it's the disease's horrible symptoms that worry doctors.

"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who has treated a majority of Morgellons patients, told the San Antonio Express-News.

Patients infected with the disease get lesions that never heal.

But that's not all. Specks and fibers come out of the lesions.

Travis Wilson, a Morgellons sufferer for over a year, once called his mother in to see a fiber coming out of a lesion in his chest.

"It looked like a piece of spaghetti was sticking out about a quarter to an eighth of an inch long and it was sticking out of his chest," Lisa Wilson said. "I tried to pull it as hard as I could out and I could not pull it out.

"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Wilson.

More than 100 cases of the disease have been reported in South Texas.

Currently the only treatment that has shown success is an antibiotic. More than half of Morgellons patients have also been diagnosed with Lymes disease, but no other connections have been found.

"It sounds a little like a parasite, like a fungal infection, like a bacterial infection, but it never quite fits all the criteria of any known pathogen," said Savely, who continues to treat the disease others say isn't real.

It looks like the disease is staying around Austin and San Antonio, but since they don't know where the disease comes from, there's no knowing how to prevent it or how far away it might spread.

And that has me concerned, because I'm headed for central Texas next Saturday, and my mom and my sister and her family live there all the time. This disease sounds too horrible for words. Let's hope they find the source and especially the cure.