http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16/AR2008011603134.html?referrer=digg

From the page: “Thousands of people around the world say they have a disease that causes mysterious fibers to sprout painfully through the skin, and they’ve given it a name. The spread of ‘Morgellons disease’ could be Internet hysteria, or it could be an emerging illness demanding our attention

Sue Laws remembers the night it began. It was October 2004, and she’d been working in the basement home office of her Gaithersburg brick rambler where she helps her husband run their tree business. She was sitting at her computer getting the payroll out, when all of a sudden she felt as if she were being attacked by bees. The itching and stinging on her back was so intense that she screamed for her husband, Tom. He bounded downstairs and lifted her shirt, but he couldn’t see anything biting her. She insisted something must be. To prove there was nothing there, he stuck strips of thick packing tape to her back and ripped them off. Then they took the magnifying eyepiece that Tom, an arborist, uses to examine leaves for fungus and blight and peered at the tape. “That’s when we saw them. It was covered with these little red fibers,” Sue recalls. She’d never seen anything like them. And she had no idea where they came from.”