© Sean McCormickSue Laws of Gaithersburg sits in her kitchen chair, where she has spent many sleepless nights agonizing over symptoms of a mysterious disease
In 2004, Sue Laws began to itch. She found tiny red fibers all over her back. Within weeks, her skin broke out in lesions. She felt bugs crawling under her skin, and one day, she said, she pulled a worm out of her eyeball and coughed up a springtail fly. "That's when I thought, 'I'm really going to kill myself,'" the Gaithersburg resident told
The Washington Post Magazine in 2008 in a story about a strange medical condition she thought was Morgellons.
Laws's doctors thought she was delusional. But she found a host of other sufferers on the Internet and joined the Morgellons Research Foundation and the lobbying effort that prompted a number of lawmakers, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, to write the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demanding an investigation.
Now, nearly three years later, the CDC has completed its investigation of Morgellons, or what it calls unexplained dermopathy, evaluating patients in Northern California and sending tissue samples to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for analysis.
CDC experts are preparing the final draft of their report, which they hope to submit for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal sometime in early 2011.