Sue Laws remembers the night it began. It was October 2004, and she'd been working in the basement home office of her Gaithersburg, Md., 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.
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©Lab of Vitaly Citovsky/SUNY at Stony Brook
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Some call it the "fiber disease," but most refer to it as Morgellons, a name taken from a similar condition of children wasting away with "harsh hairs" described in the 17th century
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Comment: This sort of heavy-handed set-up is all too common in the US: once a person is labelled as criminal - or just non-compliant - they become a non-person forever, and the authorities feel justified in taking any steps necessary to force compliance.