Is there an actual epidemic right now, or are you just talking about the perennial problem?
I wasn't aware we'd given up. The baseball parents tell me the kids all now have their own batting helmets to avoid lice.
It is a perennial epidemic. I'd say on a monthly basis I know someone dealing with lice, and I assume we'll get it at least twice a year.
We spray the kids with mint oil as they leave every morning, which is supposedly vaguely unpleasant to the little lousies.
Really. We get maybe two warnings a year for the whole school and I've never known anyone who had it (and old me about it). No one in our household (which is, of course, relatively small) has ever had it.
Why can't we just cooperate for once in our lives instead of regressing to medieval times?
Cuz Freedom!!!!!!
And I've never had bedbugs or known anybody with them. Apparently, a couple of years ago there were some in the building next door to my office, but the only impact here was that bedbug sniffing dog. I assumed somebody was defrauding the building's owner and let him carry on.
I don't know anyone local who has had bedbugs. But they sound terrifying.
I don't know if this is applicable or not, but I think it goes to my desire to never live somewhere without a hard freeze every winter.
I wasn't aware that you all freeze your kids' heads hard every winter.
The bedbug-sniffing dog was adorable.
We've had lice twice, lifetime -- the two kids and me each time. Once from batting helmets in Little League, once just from school. Annoying, but it doesn't seem like an intolerable level of coping with it.
Nobody will even use the "class scrunchie" anymore.
Assuming you don't cover the face, can't you just put kids' heads in the blue liquid the barber has for combs?
Only time anyone in my family dealt with lice was when we were living in Texas.
Obviously all kids should have their heads shaved, like Samuel L. Jackson.
Or the Hitler Youth. You can spin it either way, depending on local norms.
My wife grew up in Thailand, with both lice and bedbugs. When our child suddenly developed lice, I went to the store, bought special plastic bags, soap, this and that, threw everything into the plastic bags and prepared to spend several days at the laundromat and then destroy the house with fire. My wife told me to wait, picked all the lice and eggs off his head and made him take a bath. Then she did it again the next day. Then the lice were gone.
As for bedbugs, the Thais got rid of them by fogging the entire village with DDT a generation ago, and they never came back.
What would a public policy response to live look like?
I had bedbugs once when I lived in Morocco. Caught it early and so was able to get rid of them. Worst itch I've ever felt in my life. My arms were too bloody to even be covered in scabs. For an intractable bedbug infestation my public policy suggestion would be arson.
Yeah, nitpicking totally works. It's, as you might guess, fussy and careful work, but it works.
20 live s/b lice.
Fucking autocorrect thinks it knows better than me.
On DDT, my dad recalls covering whole buildings with it. They'd give him a bucket and big mop-like thing and send him to cover all the walls of the barn.
http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/95786.php
Solution: move to North Dakota.
The UK used to have "nit nurses" who visited schools once a year or so and inspected all the pupils individually for head lice. (I never experienced this personally, thank god, either at my state primary or independent secondary school.) They were phased out from the 1980s because they weren't effective, as well as out of concerns about what public shaming was doing to students. With the current nostalgia for all things 1950s, I can just see the Tories reintroducing them along with grammar schools.
They had that when I was a kid also. I don't know if they still do it or not.
We will start taking lice seriously when they start spreading serious diseases the way ticks do. Which is probably inevitable.
I can just see the Tories reintroducing them along with grammar schools.
I can't, they cost money. But while it's true that they were ineffective compared to other means of control by the 1980s, in 1945 or whenever they started, they were all there was, however imperfect.
I've twice come home from trips where after a few days I broke out with bites all over. Some of the bites would seem to reoccur, possibly from persistent itching. It doesn't seem like we ever got an actual infestation, but I was extremely paranoid for months after both instances. Even if you don't actually have bedbugs they can mess with your mental state.
Fogger trucks were a feature of summer camp life in the early sixties. (Christie Lake, since Ontario lake location is now a thing on this blog) Sometimes supplemented by hand-held foggers, who'd visit our huge tents at night, while we were in them. This is a bell tent, with a dozen boys in it. You were supposed to bury your face in your sleeping bag for a few seconds.
Roc Islanders fog occasionally. A million cockroaches crawl out of everywhere and die slowly all over the sidewalk.
"We will start taking lice seriously when they start spreading serious diseases the way ticks do."
And we'll take mosquitos seriously then too- I'm sure Congress will immediately approve money to work on the problem.
Our new city has everything we might need within a couple blocks, including a nitpicker.
If we ever had bedbugs I'd totally whip up a batch of DDT myself for personal use.
Admit it, you're all itching reading this thread.
I want clarification, urgently.
Quite a good one, in retrospect.
I remember seeing lice as a plotline on TV shows about school all the time, but it never came up at my school.
Lesson: Lice are everywhere in Texas and California
I thought that the issue with bedbugs was that they were immune to DDT these days. Is it still a magic bullet?
Yes, nit-picking is the only thing that works, and it works well. The problem is that this isn't a widespread understanding. Lots of parents douse their kids with various shampoos and keep going.
Can't you just pay somebody to nit pick? I certainly can't see well enough to do it.
32 Mossy have you seem Tsai Ming-liang's "The Hole"? It begins with that as a plot point. And gets really weird from there. Wonderful film and one of my favorites.
I've been pretty lucky that the lice thing is mostly a white problem here. Just combing out the older girls' locs isn't really an option. We've managed to miss bedbugs too, though it's a big problem here in general and specifically for foster families that have a lot of kids in and out of the home.
5 is me. I'm not sure I understand nitpicking. I mean, I understand, but wouldn't it be easier to shave the person's head?
Also, Moby, I endorse your "good hard freeze" strategy, and have adopted it as my own.
44: I'll keep an eye out for it. (I'm only a very lazy dilettantish cinephile.)
They have the equivalent of nit nurses here, and yes it's very embarrassing. To be fair, I would have had no idea that the kids had lice, since like Moby I'm from a civilized part of the world where lice exists only on TV.
It does seem like a problem that could be eliminated through collective action. Though here they are capable of collective action and they don't do it, so maybe it's not worth the cost?
What's even the potential collective action strategy? Public education about nit combs? Public shaming of parents for having children filthy enough to have lice (iirc this was a subplot in some famous kid's book about the olden days, the deep horrible shame of having lice). A "don't share hats" rule (I think they do this already).
Locs for everyone!
Do you have no-nit policies in heebie-ISD? These are apparently counseled against by the CDC, AAP, etc.
We could put children with lice in cages made of clear plastic on the playground until the lice went away, so that they could be visible to the other children but not play with/infect them. That would make parents and children care about lice.
I'm also confused about the collective action strategy. Better information about diagnosis and nitcombing would probably help, but wouldn't solve it.
Public shaming of parents for having children filthy enough to have lice (iirc this was a subplot in some famous kid's book about the olden days, the deep horrible shame of having lice).
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn might be what you're thinking of. The protagonist gets sent to school with her hair tightly braided and soaked in kerosene to keep away the lice from the other, dirtier, children.
I mean, I understand, but wouldn't it be easier to shave the person's head?
Sure, but hard on girls and women. I would have looked very odd in a legal office with my head buzzed to a quarter inch.
Demi Moore wouldn't let that stop her.
I feel like lice shame was a thing in one of the Little House books but Google doesn't seem to back me up. Maybe it was a Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
55.last sounds very dangerous given that teachers smoked in class back then.
56: ah, but if everyone else was doing it too it'd be OK. Plus I think the intention is to just shave kids' heads, not shave the heads of the entire population at once.
Well, when the kids had lice, I got them too. So if the idea was to shave the heads of people with lice, that would have been me.
I think that all you'd manage to do is prevent anybody from reporting lice in girls.
Establishing once and for all that girls truly do have cooties.
I always figured if my son got lice, I'd just have his head shaved, but I don't know if my wife would tolerate that. He's got very nice hair.
Not only kids get headlice though. I would rather comb my hair than shave my head. (Obviously, since that's what I did.) We went to France one year and realised at the beginning of a two week holiday that one of the kids had lice. I'd actually looked at the nit comb whilst packing and thought, nah, too paranoid. So then I had to go to a pharmacy and say "mes enfants ont les animaux dans les cheveux" whilst miming scratching my head - it did produce the desired result (a new nit comb), but was pretty ridiculous.
The advantage of Belgium: everyone speaks English.
61: Ah, you see, if you'd been a British lawyer you would have worn a wig and no one would have known. At worst your colleagues might have remarked on your eccentricity in wearing your wig all the time rather than just in court.
66- my first guess at hearing that and the corresponding action would be monkeys.
66 -- the correct French would have been "my children have poo in their hair" so I can see why you didn't want to say that.
This must be a Texas thing. My sister and I had lice once in elementary school, and that was it. We had the shampoo and the nit combs and got rid of them pretty quickly. When I was a kid there was a family of four siblings who went to our church because my father made sure they had food for the week and toys, and I remember when they had lice their mom shaved their heads. The oldest daughter was about 8-9 and she was pretty ashamed to have no hair, and in my mind the sort of parent who would shave her children's hair rather than pick out the nits was the same sort of mother who would sell her foodstamps for crack and let her children go hungry.
IIRC The Thornbirds also has a scene where Meggie gets lice and it's considered very shameful.
68 - Mais les singes sont dans les arbres, pas dans les cheveux.
69 - I'll remember that. Possibly. Having first checked if it's true.
I always get by in France, but it does involve not worrying about sounding like a idiot.
Now Android Chrome keeps popping up a message on comment pages saying "Make this page mobile-friendly". You're plenty friendly, little site.
The collective action strategy would be to have a nit-picker hired by the school, and to actually treat the lice in the school system. It could easily be done discreetly, the same way kids get pulled out of class for counseling or anything else.
Obviously this is not ever, ever going to happen.
I think that all you'd manage to do is prevent anybody from reporting lice in girls.
Sort of like how we treat HPV by only vaccinating the girls. (I know that's changing.)
The alternative would be a consensus that lice are class-related, that louse-shaming and lousephobia are beyond the pale, and that the way forwards is the abandonment of hate speech like "lousy weather" and the promotion of a generally louse-acceptant culture.
69 is correct as attested by the approximately 86 million emails I've received from the child's school over the years notifying us re "poux" in this or that grade.
In heathen SF the boys get the HPV vaccine too, there was no question about it.
73.1: My kids' school has a clinic with a nurse practitioner who's there a few days a week and works for free and I was there this morning because they couldn't find the right paperwork and Nia had an earache and could be treated there rather than my having to take her to the doctor tonight during walk-in hours or by pulling her out of school and missing more work than it took to go down the block to the school and fill out the paper. (The nurse practitioner impressed me by giving me a paper prescription so that if her ear gets better with time and ibuprofen I don't have to put her on unnecessary antibiotics but if it gets worse or at least she keeps complaining I can go ahead and get something that will knock out the ear infection.) The school nurse was saying to the nurse practitioner as I walked in that "The next girl already has confirmed hrrrrrrrm" while pointing to a paper, so while not trying to do more than passively overhear I still assumed lice. I may ask the school nurse later whether they do treatment there.
I don't know anyone local who has had bedbugs. But they sound terrifying.
This. As bad as lice sound, bedbugs sound so much worse.
We're dealing with a flea infestation from the cat at the moment. He likes to cuddle up with us in bed. I've got flea bites all over my legs, so I'm relating to this thread.
At the vet's suggestion, we've switched him from the flea-and-tick stuff to the flea-only stuff for his monthly treatment (the latter is supposed to be stronger against fleas). We'll see how that goes.
Last night, while I was vacuuming up the cat hair and flea debris from the table (where he also likes to curl up), at my wife's suggestion, I took a pass at vacuuming the cat for a second (with the brush attachment, so it could have been a kind of grooming). This ... did not go well. He watched me suspiciously the rest of the time I had the vacuum out, and bared his teeth whenever it got too close.
We're over the worst of the flea infestation, but it was pretty bad this summer, from the hordes of neighborhood stray cats. I fully support a collective action measure called GET A COYOTE TO EAT ALL OF THESE FUCKING STRAY CATS
We've had head lice several times and fleas only once, and the fleas were incomparably worse. It took a couple of weeks of fogging and spraying and vacuuming and putting bedding through the drier at high heat to finally get rid of the little bastards. Nit picking and combing were a breeze by comparison.
Cockroaches, on the other hand, I learned to live with in Japan without much drama. In old wooden houses they live in the gaps between the inner and outer walls, so fumigating always left enough of them surviving to repopulate pretty quickly. I ended up with a grudging respect for their tenacity, and in any case the cat would catch and eat at least half the ones we saw. (In England he has to be content with moths and spiders.)
How about just shave and release the cats?
I never really saw the issue with cockroaches. They're benign.
Our house has no end of house centipedes, which I don't mind too much but for the fear that I'm going to startle one and have it bite me. I've heard they hurt.
81: I've been most amused by my colleagues' reactions to roaches. They're laughable compared to the beasties in Mossheimat. They can be killed with no more than a flyswatter, for instance.
I don't know if those bite or not. Our basement is full of them, especially during a rainy year. They don't come up the stairs if we leave the light on.
85 to 83. We don't have any roaches that I've ever seen.
Speaking of pets, I now have a Dragonite.
This is a question I've been meaning to ask and now it's on topic.
Somebody quoted this to me once --
Count no man truly rich
That does not have a scratch for every itch.
I was told it was an Ogden Nash quote, but when I googled this it had no hits and the Ogden Nash quote is just, "Happiness is having a scratch for every itch."
Has anybody heard that couplet before? Have any insight into the situation?
Whatever it is, it clearly needs a variable to cover the actual amount of itching. Like itches/cm2 or something.
I had lice as a child! As far as I can tell, I got them from the back of a movie theater seat, or possibly at a sleepover. We had nit inspections at school. I was shamed. In fact, after I'd been treated with combings and toxic shampoo, I was called out of class regularly for a couple of weeks for reinspection.
This was the mid-eighties in a relatively well-off Chicago suburb.
I'm glad they don't do this anymore - it wasn't really much worse than the cluster of awful school things that happened around that time, but it wasn't very fun either.
Probably the sleepover -- what I was told when we all had them is that they really don't stay alive on inanimate objects much. Contagion is almost always head to head, or head--hat/comb/whatever--head with a very short time lapse.
to 73: Nitpicking is awfully timeconsuming for something to happen during the school day, and ideally involves coating the hair in oil/conditioner/goop of some kind. I don't think there's an obvious solution here.
My kids' school has a clinic with a nurse practitioner who's there a few days a week and works for free
I recently heard something on the radio about the lack of school nurses. It is horrifying to think that each school doesnt have at least one school nurse.
We don't have a school nurse. I think there are two district nurses, one covering preschool-grade 6 and one 7-12, so the first split between two schools, though I don't know for sure that there is a second one and the first may be the only one. There's also the free clinic with a nurse practitioner a few days a week and it happens to be at the school down the street from me but is a place parents/guardians can bring kids who are home sick or take their kids out of one of the other schools to bring them there. Ones already in the building can go right they're if they're sick, which is nice for us. But there isn't a school nurse at all times. There is one counselor per school, but most of the intensive therapy is done by someone who comes in from one of the outside agencies too.
So Nia claims she couldn't get ibuprofen yesterday because it wasn't a day where the nurse was there. I'm skeptical about the first part of that claim, especially since she was angling to be allowed to stay home or something. But it's possible only nurses can give out medicine and so sometimes the kids can't get medicine at all even if there's a waiver signed allowing the school to administer it. (They do make arrangements for prescription drugs, I know.)
Maybe prophylactic head-shaving should be an add-on to the school uniforms movement. Think of all the money to be saved on barrettes and scrunchies, and the class-leveling of all the baldheaded little kids wearing the same clothes. A worker's paradise and a no louse's land.
A million cockroaches crawl out of everywhere and die slowly all over the sidewalk.
I'm not proud of it, but this image gives me pleasure. I realise that roaches have their own problems and living to make in the world and probably don't deserve my species-cidal hatred, but I grew up in a subtropical climate where bigass cockroaches are gross and plentiful, and unpleasantly fast-moving, and they fly, and they bite, and they hide out in your shoes and terrorise you in those moments between when you realise there's something moving around your toes and when you can get your shoes unlaced and off, so fuck them.
You who live in climates that keep cockroaches a little bit stunted and torpid, you don't know the real cockroach.
3 kids made it through school with only one of them getting lice, despite school infestations every year. Combing the one very sad teenager twice under bright light solved it.
Now with this last one I have a battery operated electric nit comb waiting, and I hope it doesn't sound terrible to say I am so psyched to use it. No chance yet.
Combing the one very sad teenager twice under bright light solved it.
Ooh, I never thought about how this would work as a teenager's problem (I only encountered lice issues at gradeschool ages). Complicated. And, yes, sad.
I was doing fine until 96 last.
Too confronting? Or you don't accept the premise?
Here, while I'm licesplaining, there are weekly checks at daycare, which people pay to attend. And in general my kids know which kids have lice habitually or after an inspection, though there's no particular shame or judgment attached to it. I do sometimes lecture them a little extra about "I TOLD YOU not to share hair stuff with anyone and definitely not with Paula because her lice are contagious and could move to your hair," which has finally started to get through recently.
As I've said before, I believe the theory that lice are evolved to have feet that grip straight hair or curly hair and that it's hard for them to cross from one sort of head to another. Also since caring for natural curly/kinked/coily hair often means adding oil or conditioner rather than stripping it out the way you might with straight hair, you're already creating an environment that's less hospitable to lice. But it's also mostly been luck.
while I'm licesplaining
That's a microaggression, you know.
We've had it 3 times and lice are terrible. Nitpicking is very time and labor intensive. I use the big guns--pharmacy grade malathion--but I don't mind chemicals. But even that is failing as life build resistance. My kids have super thick long hair and the combing took hours. I hear today's selfie culture increases head to head contact (think about how kids pose for pictures together). It is a scientific fact lice are less likely to be found in African American hair because it's structure is different. We use tea tree oil as a preventative. Also a light dusting of hair spray.
96: Swope, I was careless, should have said "second last" paragraph. I'd made it through the thread without itching, and then your vivid insect description made me stop everything I was doing and do a full body shake.
We didn't have the regular inspections at 1980s School, but we did have a nit outbreak, and then the nit nurses showed up - they'd moved from a bobbies-on-the-beat to a SWAT team strategy. This squad of vaguely militaristic middle-aged women with bags full of bottles of livid blue pesticides just descended and ordered everyone to wash their hair in this scary blue gunk four times a week.
Don't think I've ever had lice. Have fleas now, and we've had problems with ants in the house this summer, which sounds unremarkable except for the fact that they were nesting inside the house. (A plant was moved outside for a couple days, and then back in, and they came with it.) I feel vaguely guilty about the fleas, because I'm the more cat-positive adult in the house and I'm less flea-bitten than my wife or daughter. But about those and the ants, all I can say is, I'm surprised and relieved that things aren't worse. Our cat spends most of his time outside and our toddler throws food on the floor. Problems seem inevitable.
As for roaches, they don't really bother me outdoors and indoors I see dead ones more often than live ones, so I figure we must be doing something right.
I assumed 69 was a joke until 76, and, yeah, that sounds familiar and Google confirms it. Similar but not identical to French for "flea". French: a subtle language.
66: I had a similar approach when I wanted Kleenex but couldn't remember the French term: "des papiers pour quand on a le nex qui coule."
On ants, once I was watching an apartment for a couple that had gone away for the summer. It was on the third floor. The first time I went to check on the place, I found they left a basket of apples on the counter of their kitchen. There was a train of ants up the stairs, under the door, and up to the counter to the apples.
105: I think so. Lice seemed to stop being a problem.
105: he was so terrified that he's been using the blue gunk four times a week ever since.
Oh, poux. Well, I wouldn't have been bothered about saying that. (And could have laughed at my children, "ha ha, tu as POO sur ta tête") I was imagining some informal word for nits that also actually meant poo, in a sort of lousy=shitty way.
97 - Penny, a friend of mine has a nit-zapper and swears by it, says it's very satisfying - hope your kids get headlice soon!
Texas and California has "super lice" which is immune to common treatments:
I think the ones in NY are immune as well. When we had them, I washed the kids' hair in Rid, and then nit-combed with a lot of conditioner, and I was combing live lice out. But hey, it worked.
109: shit, you ain't lived 'til you've had a blue gunk high. It makes you feel...unlousy.
To the OP, h-g is right as usual. We went through waves of lice infestation a few years ago, and dealing with nits on my daughters' luxuriant tresses several times was unbelievably time-consuming and soul-crushing. At one point I asked the school nurse why they didn't take a public health approach--examining all the kids and putting out alerts to all the parents--and she responded that studies have shown that the kids weren't picking up lice at school, which was total bullshit and made me so mad I wanted to bite her on the head.
When I was a kid, the nurse would occasionally go from classroom to classroom and check the kids' heads, which was potentially humiliating, but you could just as easily have kids step out into the hall one by one to be seen privately. In the case of an epidemic, it seems irresponsible not to deal with it collectively, because it just keeps coming around.
Thanks to this thread, I had a nightmare last night where I was sleeping on a bedbug-infested mattress and someone (but who?) was trying to tell me they were basically harmless. Ack!
We had centipedes in our apt in Astoria. I didn't see them too often, but when I did, they were was mostly hanging out on the ceiling. They struck me as intelligent, and predatory (and I figured they were helping to keep other nasty things at bay: or so I liked to tell myself...).
110: ooh thanks asilon, fingers crossed!
flea = puce, as in marche aux puces (add the trudging uphill accent over the "e" in marche as I can't from the thing I'm typing on, merci!)
117, I seem to be among many who learned that early on in French class, but never learned the word for lice, and am surprised they are so similar.
I've had lice a zillion times. they most definitely exist in the south, in DC, and in narnia. I haven't seen any scorpions yet in AZ but I'm looking. the giant flying cockroach problem is dealt with in the south by re-christening them "palmetto bugs" and pretending they live outside. (I now expect ajay will wonder if they were ever baptized to begin with.)
separately, neb or someone, will you email me? I can't log in to post somehow. I can live-blog medical procedures. not the mri, plausibly.