Humanity’s itchy little nuisance resists common pesticides and drives parents crazy. Will we ever be rid of head lice? Doctors say it’s unlikely.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Nothing may inspire more panic than getting that letter from the school – check your kids for lice. Head lice are a nuisance and terribly common. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say 12 million Americans will get the blood-sucking parasites this year, mostly school children and their parents. Just talking about it is making my head itch. Here’s NPR’s Dianna Douglas.
(CROSSTALK)
DIANNA DOUGLAS, BYLINE: Kids have zero sense of personal space, so it’s easy to imagine why they’re the perfect vectors for spreading head lice. Kristen Dreiling (ph) has two boys in elementary school, and there are rules when they play with friends.
KRISTEN DREILING: So no hugging, no, like – certainly no sharing hats or coats or whatever.
DOUGLAS: But heads are touching everywhere on this playground. Kids crowd around iPads. They clamor over each other. They cuddle into their parents’ laps – a straight path for a louse to start crawling up.
DREILING: We have received many notices about lice outbreaks in their classes.
DOUGLAS: Dreiling paid a professional nitpicker the last time her boys had lice. It was a couple hundred dollars.
DOUGLAS: At the end of the day, it’s just a huge inconvenience ’cause you have to do all the things. According to Dawn Nolt, pediatric infectious disease doctor, Americans will spend more than $500 million to try to get rid of lice this year. Dr. Nolt wrote the lice recommendations for the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP. She wants everyone to understand that lice is not an emergency.
DAWN NOLT: People really get very nervous, but what I’m trying to say is that this can be somewhat inevitable. Take a breath and know that there are ways to treat this.
DOUGLAS: Troublingly, she says that most lice are now resistant to shampoos sold over the counter. Dr. Nolt said the AAP is rethinking the recommendation for lice shampoos in favor of Ivermectin. Ivermectin kills lice without hours of combing or days of laundry.
NOLT: You only have to give it once or twice, and the killing efficacy seems very good.
DOUGLAS: If you want to avoid chemical warfare, you can try suffocating head lice with olive oil or mayonnaise or petroleum jelly. Sticky, but Dr. Nolt says they work. And speaking of sticky, those myths about lice that just won’t die.
NOLT: It is not a sign of poor hygiene or low socioeconomic class or the color of someone’s hair, the length of someone’s hair, the texture of someone’s hair.
DOUGLAS: But the most persistent myth that Nolt wishes would die?
NOLT: That it flies – that it just happens to fly or hop. It doesn’t do that. You really have to be very close.
DOUGLAS: Somehow, the idea of little bugs in our hair inspires such an outsize level of panic that some schools send kids home for a suspected case of lice. That is against all expert recommendations. The worst thing lice does is cause itchiness. There’s one ray of hope on the horizon for parents who just can’t handle lice discussions in the group chat. Kids do eventually learn the norms around personal space, and the lice infestations stop.
NOLT: It seems to really drop off late adolescent, early adulthood.
DOUGLAS: Until then, godspeed to everyone fighting the war against lice, especially as we move into summertime slumber parties and sleep-away camps.
Dianna Douglas, NPR News.
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