Could Morgellons be caused by a ‘biological insecticide’?

I’ve been watching a spectacle go down at Respectful Insolence where Orac is battling some nutcase who does ‘research’ into a disease called Morgellons.

Morgellons, according to it’s followers is characterized by a combination of skin rashes and of fibers growing out of the skin of the afflicted. There’s a debate over whether or not this is a real disease. Entomologists actually have kind of a unique role because we see a lot of people claiming to have Morgellons, but are actually afflicted by a condition called ‘delusatory parasitosis’ which is fancy talk for ‘thinks they have bugs crawling in their skin’. Extension entomologists generally get people who claim to have the symptoms of Morgellons but tend to send in empty pieces of tape or lint filled scabs.

Aaaah the life of an entomologist, right?

Anyways, what made me comment about the poster’s claim was this line:

To let you know; Morgellons disease is caused from a biological insecticide, spread from US companies without any care if immunocompromised humans or animals gets sick from it. If you want i can send you a few medical reports about such infections, exactely with the same type of fungi used from pesticide industry. So many are suffering from this disease and killing themself after a long painful fighting. Most from USA…So forgive me that I help them as a German and not as an American!! I am sorry also that some sentences of my articles are not uptodate etc., less time and helpers to correct my bad English. I just work every day 14 hours to help your neighbors instead writing silly things on blogs!!

I would absolutely love to see those reports.

Why?

Because I work with those so-called ‘biological insecticides’.

The project I’m working on right now involves parasitoid wasps. We’re looking for a way to replace napthalene (mothballs) to control moths which burrow through wax frames with parasitic wasps which nom their eggs. Napthalene is a carcinogen, and it appears that it might end up in the wax because it’s fat-soluible…which is bad considering that same wax holds honey (although we don’t sell our honey…another story entirely)*. Chemicals are generally regarded as a necessary evil in most agriculture situations, but because we deal in insects we can’t spray our frames with insecticides.

Anyways, we like to use biological controls whenever we can. They’re generally safer for people and animals because they tend to be pretty insect-specific. The fungi in question are broad spectrum, of course…B. bassiana will afflict both honeybees and caterpillars…but otherwise they don’t infect humans very often. The EPA even considers this as a safe pesticide, and you can see the type of testing it’s gone through here.

There are two fungi which I briefly considered for the project, Metarhizium and Beauveria. I decided not to use them because they were too broad-spectrum. I was actually more worried that if we used it, that the fungi would infect the bees.

But here’s the thing about these fungi, and this guy’s claim…these fungi aren’t exactly rare. They’re both quite common soil-dwelling fungi and commonly infect insects without our intervention. In fact, I could probably go out with a sleeve of petri dishes and culture both fungi with only a little bit of effort.

In the 1800s, a guy by the name of Francis Snow working out of the University of Kansas actually devised an ingenious program to combat chinch bugs. He traded chinch bugs which had been killed with B. bassiana with chinch bugs which were healthy. The program was successful for awhile, and it shows that this fungus was actually quite common before we started harnessing it as an insecticide and applying it in large scale settings.

Both these fungi are quite good at infecting insects. Beauveria even manages to get it’s way into humans occasionally. To find these case reports, I simply searched for ‘Beauveria infection’, ‘Beauveria case report’ or ‘Beauveria case’ on pubmed. At this point, I should mention that I’m an entomology student who’s interested in a claim about an organism he works with quite often. I’m not a doctor who frequently deals in case reports, so there may be more that I’m not aware of.

The fungus is a very rare pathogen, although it does infect humans very occasionally. A few of the articles mention that the fungus they isolated from their patients didn’t have a connection to the strains used as biopesticides.

However, there’s something here that makes me doubt Mr. Neumann’s claims. If you go through the abstracts (which is really all I have access to, save one case) the fungus has a tendency to attack corneas and not skin. It also seems to need trauma to occur to the corneas before it can infect although there were a few which were associated with contact lenses. Furthermore, in the few (n=2 as far as I can tell) cases where the fungus actually managed to infect the skin it seems the patients were immunocompromised. Actually, they were leukemia patients so I’m fairly certain their immune systems bore quite a bit of resemblance to Monty Python’s Black Night.

So…Mr. Neumann’s claims are really really sketchy to say the least. I’m not a doctor, and my institution doesn’t give me access to any of those case reports with the exception of one.

From what I can tell, for the fungus to grow in the skin as Neumann claims it does, you would probably need to be very seriously immunocompromised. In the rare instances where the fungus infects humans, it tends to be an opportunistic pathogen which infects the eyes. None of the case reports mentioned fibers growing out of the skin, either.

In short, I’m in no way qualified to judge the veracity of Mr. Neumann’s claims, so the only thing I’m going to say is that I really have no reason to accept his claims. I study insects, not medicine. I know *a lot* about the fungus, it’s prevalence in the environment and it’s ecological role and based on what I can see in Beauveria infection in humans (I couldn’t find any Metarhizium cases, although there may be a handful out there) the symptoms don’t seem to match up to the symptoms that Morgellon’s sufferers claim.

Quite frankly, since I’ve shown that Beauveria can be isolated from humans on occasion I would wonder why this disease is such a mystery if the cause is this simple. You really can’t invoke a coverup by the big, evil pesticide industry because chemical insecticides are still far more popular than fungal pesticides. If they were shown to be harmful, banning them would certainly be more straightforward than a drug like VIOXX.

Another thing that I’d like to know: Assuming that Mr. Neumann is correct about Beauveria (or a similar fungus) being the cause of Morgellon’s, how does he know whether it’s been used as a biopesticide or simply a natural variant that his patients happened to be exposed to during their daily routine?

*It’s also unlikely that napthalene ends up in the honey in any significant amount. No worries there.