If your children have ever had head lice, you probably flinch every time they scratch their head. Could it be those blasted bugs again? One bout with medicated shampoos and washing everything in the house and picking through hair strand by strand looking for nits ... the only thing worse than having to wage an all-out war to remove every last trace of louse life is knowing that your child won't be able to go back to school until you do.
And why is that? Do head lice spread disease? Do they cause injury? Do they fly about the room and lite on everything in sight? Do the nits somehow pass from child to child like live bugs?
In a word: No.
So why are children being excluded from school merely for having a few louse eggs stuck to their hair shafts? As much as enforced school absence is an inconvenience for children in regular education, it's a disaster for children with special needs, who miss out on needed school-provided therapies, react badly to the change of routine, may have life-threatening reactions to pesticide shampoos, and are neurologically unable to sit still for nit-picking. As one mom of a sensory integration disordered boy lamented, "If my son gets head lice, I'll just have to start home-schooling him."
Latest News
For the latest news about head lice, check the today's news, weekly news, and head-lice news folders.Background
Head lice are no buggies-come-lately. They've been around since prehistoric times, and are perfectly evolved for living, feeding, and reproducing atop the human head. Live lice lay their egg, or nits, on the hair shafts and glue them on good. Since they need regular meals of human blood to live, lice don't survive much more than a day without a head to suck on. Happily home in your hair, however, a louse can live for about a month and produce 100 offspring.
Head lice are often thought to be an indicator of poor hygiene, but they're perfectly comfortable on clean heads. They're often thought to be a sign of poor parenting, but parents are more likely to harm kids by overdoing it with pesticide shampoos than by not preventing infestation in the first place. They're often thought to leap from a bug-filled head to a bug-free one, but these are crawling insects, not jumping or flying ones. What having head lice mostly means is that somewhere within the past month, your head has touched the head of someone with lice, and an opportunistic critter has walked on over.
And since the most likely place for kids to bump noggins outside the family is at school, classrooms have become the front lines of head-lice resistance. If children's educational opportunities and parents' mental health have to be sacrificed along the way, well, nobody said war was pretty.
