Childhood Infestations: Lice

If you take a trip down memory lane, back into the days of elementary school or even preschool, you might remember the yearly checks down at the school nurse’s office. With gloved hands picking through the strands of your hair, she’d mess up your unruly hair, maybe yanking as she roughly goes through the strands, scanning...  Looking for something...  Maybe one of your classmates was discreetly pulled out of the classroom and went home for the day. If it was you, your parents would have been notified, and you would have had to use a special shampoo or be given medication for some amount of time.

If you didn’t know what she was looking for, (maybe you heard the word “lice,” but didn’t know what lice were at a young age,) it was an ectoparasite, a parasite living on your body by feeding on your blood. In elementary school, when I went through the dreaded lice checks, I didn’t even know what a louse was. All I knew was that they caused your head to itch, and they laid eggs in your scalp. Like every other child, I cringed at the thought of some bug living in my hair and laying eggs to produce more of the things.

Thankfully, head lice are relatively harmless despite being infectious and fairly common, even in the United States. Head lice are also unable to fly, so infestation is by contact with an infested person. Over the counter medications are readily available for infested persons and all clothing, bedding, and like items in contact with the head or hair should be thoroughly cleaned in hot water or air cycles.

Unless you were infested, you might be unfamiliar with two other species of lice, one that infests the body and one that infests the pubic area (also known as “crab” lice). Like head lice, body and crab lice also infest through contact with an infested person. Only body lice are known to transmit disease, such as typhus and trench fever.

To avoid lice, the only way is to avoid infested persons and places where infested persons have been. Lice do not survive off a living person for very long, a day or two at most, but it is wise to not share combs, head scarves, or hats with others. It is unlikely you’d catch lice by staying in hotels where infested people have been, unlike ticks or scabies.

“Crabs” and lice aren’t typically thought of to be a parasite, maybe because they live on the outside of one’s body, and do not live inside, such as a tapeworm. Strictly speaking, a parasite is an organism that lives off another organism while causing some detriment to the host organism. So by this definition, (female) mosquitoes could fit the definition since they live off human blood. Other ectoparasites include, but are not limited to, ticks, fleas, and scabies.

Parasites remain a topic common to tropical medicine, but are missing in industrialized countries. Parasites should be studied everywhere; there are parasites native to the United States that remain an uncommon topic. Lice are fairly harmless and mainly only cause discomfort and itchiness, but some parasites indigenous to the United States can cause detrimental effect to the health of humans. Some of these and other parasites will be a topic for the following weeks.