| SuperBowl Sunday Made Some People's Skin
Crawl NUSPA helps people cope while trying to bring attention to
their plight of what they describe as tormenting skin sensations and
excoriation their physicians otherwise attribute to an "imaginary"
illness
(PRWEB) February 8, 2005 -- When new diseases emerge, it is
invariably the sufferers who bring first notification of it to the
scientific community. Since 1998, the NUSPA (National Unidentified
Skin Parasite Association) has helped otherwise desperate sufferers
by providing them with an internet discussion board where people
meet, share observations, come for support, and work together to get
help.
NUSPA helps people cope while trying to bring
attention to their plight of what they describe as tormenting skin
sensations and excoriation their physicians otherwise attribute to
an "imaginary" illness.
Unlikely a venue as it was, along
with the ads for beer and GoDaddy.com, Super Bowl Sunday afforded
another opportunity for others to learn of the severe itching,
lesions, biting, stinging, and crawling that accompanies what until
recently was considered an unidentified skin parasite.
News
teasers flashed on the big screens during the Super Bowl game, and
Fox news outlets in San Francisco and Jacksonville, FL recently
aired stories about this emerging public health problem.
Left in desperation and to their own devices, many over the
years have resorted to whatever methods they can find to get relief for
the tormenting symptoms. Over 2,000 people reported the problem to the
National Pediculosis Association (NPA) located in Boston, MA,
prompting NPA's own clinical research effort on the problem with
remarkable findings published in the Journal of the New York
Entomological Society in June 2004.
The National
Unidentified Skin Parasite Association (NUSPA) has also received
several thousand of these reports.
Without physician
acceptance as yet, activist groups have formed and have taken
liberties to dub a variety of their own names for the illness.
People calling the problem everything from USP to Elliot's Disease
to Morgellon's Disease, where this group attributes their skin
symptoms to Lyme Disease. The only true scientific proof of the
problem to date lies with the published findings of Collembola
within the skin scrapings of study participants in a clinical trial
conducted at the Oklahoma State Department of Health in the summer
of 2000.
Hard to fathom, this was indeed a topic for the
wide screens on Super Bowl Sunday. NUSPA, an advocate website for
people seeking help, alerts the public and the medical community to
the problem, reporting that there is now bona fide evidence of the
illness and much work to be done in the area of teaching physicians
how to evaluate human skin for the most ubiquitous insect on the
planet known as Collembola.
NUSPA Support Forum: http://www.skinparasites.com/
Full NPA
Paper - Study of Collembola in Skin:
http://www.headlice.org/report/research/
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