Some schools are letting kids with live lice in their hair back in the classroom, a less restrictive policy that has parents scratching their heads.
“Lice is icky, but it’s not dangerous,” says Deborah Pontius, the school nurse for the Pershing County School District in Lovelock, Nev.
Schools in Tennessee, California, Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico and South Carolina also are adopting the more lenient lice policy.
Here’s the revised CDC recommend:
Students diagnosed with live head lice do not need to be sent home early from school; they can go home at the end of the day, be treated, and return to class after appropriate treatment has begun. Nits may persist after treatment, but successful treatment should kill crawling lice.
Head lice can be a nuisance but they have not been shown to spread disease. Personal hygiene or cleanliness in the home or school has nothing to do with getting head lice.
Both the American Association of Pediatrics and the National Association of School Nurses advocate that “no-nit” policies should be discontinued. “No-nit” policies that require a child to be free of nits before they can return to schools should be discontinued for the following reasons:
• Many nits are more than ¼ inch from the scalp. Such nits are usually not viable and very unlikely to hatch to become crawling lice, or may in fact be empty shells, also known as casings.
• Nits are cemented to hair shafts and are very unlikely to be transferred successfully to other people.
• The burden of unnecessary absenteeism to the students, families and communities far outweighs the risks associated with head lice.
• Misdiagnosis of nits is very common during nit checks conducted by nonmedical personnel.
The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its guidelines in 2010 to adopt a “do not exclude” infested students recommendation for schools dealing with head lice. It has long encouraged schools to discontinue “no-nit” policies. The itty-bitty nits — which can often be confused with dandruff — cement themselves to the hair shaft, making removal difficult.
I have a friend with four girls who would go absolutely berserk with head lice; combings, hair cuts, pesticides, all the stuffed animals in plastic bags, some cure having to do with giant tubs of off-brand Vaseline she was trying for a while there. I was always surprised her kids kept coming home with lice because they were all swimmers: it seemed like I every time I saw them they had wet hair and smelled of chlorine.
shelly
I’m not squeamish, but god, how I hate that word, ‘nits.’
Kay
@shelly:
Nits and “infest”. Is there a worse word than “infest”?
schrodinger's cat
Eeww, do not want…
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
I got them in my 20’s from the 11 year old daughter of a guy I was dating. That particular little girl was filthy and wouldn’t keep herself clean. My hair was very long, down to my butt at the time. I have tons of sympathy for your friend with four girls. And now I feel itchy.
Mike E
@Kay:
Yep, “bedbugs”.
Kay
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ:
I feel as if we talked about it for years. Obviously they were in the school so she wasn’t the only one, she was just the most vocal :)
Cermet
NEVER!!!! use those fucking pesticides!!! Those things are toxic, generally don’t even hurt the lice and can harm not just children but pets.
RATHER just use regular shampoo twice daily for three days and once per day until the lice are gone. Picking out the ‘eggs’ is needed as well. Hot water all sheets pillow cases and stote stuff toys in plastic bags for four or five months (lice/eggs will be gone by then – assuming you don’t want to part with those and they can’t be hot water cleaned.
THis is TOO FUCKING SIMPLE and no one MAKES BANK off the kids so asshole, utterly stupid MD’s don’t bother telling people this trival treatment. I’ve and other parents have used it on a number of kids and all were lice free within a week.
Kay
@Mike E:
Did you ever hear the This American Life about bedbugs? I listened to it in the car once on a long ride with my daughter and it was just tragic. This poor woman was describing her absolute horror when she got rid of all her furniture, had a free period and then realized they were back.
You genuinely felt terrible for her. It had taken over her life.
Central Planning
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ:
Unlikely you got lice from her. Lice do not like filthy hair, they like clean hair and scalps so it’s easy for them to bite.
Tea tree oil is supposed to be good for getting rid of lice. We’ve mixed a drop or two in with shampoo when my kids have picked up lice from school. Good times!
srv
If we hadn’t been so indoctrinated by Mr. Rodgers, we’d have a lot less trouble. Shave all their heads and put them in uniforms. Good enough for bootcamp, good enough for first graders.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
Obama.
Obviously.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Teabagger. I’m really starting to loathe “reform”, also, too.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cermet:
I absolutely guarantee you that doctors are not giving parents incorrect advice on how to deal with lice for financial profit. My family is in medicine. I’ve worked in non-medical jobs in the medical field. I’ve known a whole lot of doctors in my time, and they wouldn’t be horrified or offended, they’d be confused by that allegation. Not only is it unethical, there’s no money to be made.
Nits are not easy to pick out of hair, or even to spot. I’ve raised kids, and removing enough toys long enough to make a big difference is a major task not likely to happen. Most insecticides are harmless to humans unless you ingest large amounts of them or keep ingesting them over time. Using an insecticide shampoo temporarily is a no-brainer that reduces the likelihood of reinfestation, especially since it’s hard for parents to go through the full anti-lice regimen even if they really want to. Everything else you’ve just suggested is already recommended.
Interrobang
@Cermet: A lot of the “pesticides” you seem to be up in arms about are pyrethrins, which are derived from chrysanthemums. (They have a distinctive crysanthemum smell.) They’re hardly as toxic as you seem to think. Personally, I had lice when I was in my middle 20s (got them from some kids I was babysitting at the time), and I would have dunked my damn head in RAID if it would have made it stop.
“Regular shampoo” also doesn’t get rid of all crawling lice particularly if you have long hair; I think when I first noticed I had the lice, I had washed my hair about four times just previously, like to the point where my hair was still dripping, and when I looked in the mirror, a louse crawled over the crown of my head.
As a stopgap measure, you can coat your hair down with some kind of oil, which does get into their air pores and stops them being able to breathe, but that does take some time. Insects drown really slowly.
Given how much of a fucking hassle lice can be to get rid of (Clean all the things? CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!), this policy is ill-advised. Leaving this thread now; got to go scratch my head until I bleed.
MomSense
Lice like clean hair so the chlorine thing is not helpful.
@Cermet:
Yes to hot water, picking the eggs, olive oil works well too.
Anoniminous
Head lice do not carry disease but they are a vector for bacteria to enter the bloodstream. Given the fact MRSA is now “in the community” (per link) it would be wise to close this vector.
Head lice are easy to prevent and control by following some few, basic, sanitation and prevention procedures.
Having demonstrated my scientific detachment: yee-eewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Belafon
The school administrators have obviously not seen Invader Zim.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
Me too. Ed reform really ruined it for me, and now “pension reform”. Yeah. I bet you’re “reforming” pensions. How so?
Pen
@Interrobang: so… You want children with a transferable parasite in schools? Ummm, no. Send them home, send them their homework and notes if you must, and let them back when they aren’t infested anymore.
The CDC guidelines seem to state that infested kids can finish the day and then go home for treatment, being allowed back after treatment is done. This is a decent policy, but I can just see people got getting the point and trying to recind any restrictions at all. No thanks.
cleek
great. now my head itches.
Anoniminous
Interestingly, head lice and pubic lice are two completely different species. Head lice evolved along with humans. Pubic lice evolved with gorillas and, somehow, made the jump to humans about 3 million years ago, probably from both species using the same sleeping sites, albeit at different times.
cathyx
My daughter got lice once in 3rd grade from a boy who had it and didn’t know it. Anyone who’s lived through trying to get rid of it would never agree that it’s no big deal. Kids who are allowed to stay in school when they have it will spread it to others. This policy is insane.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
That does drive me crazy. All kinds of things in our society could use reform – usually in the sense that we should invest a lot more in them. Conservatives just use the word ‘reform’ as cover for ‘destroy’.
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
@Interrobang:
Actually, there is a genuine pesticide problem — lice have become resistant to the ones currently on the market. So parents probably are better off going with the “green” methods that physically suffocate the little bastards in case their kid has the ones that are pesticide-resistant.
ETA: “Little bastards” referring to the lice, not the kids. Just to be clear. ;-)
Cacti
@Mike E:
Those little bastards are a nightmare to get rid of.
What finally worked for me was getting an exterminator who killed them with heat.
Betty Cracker
OMG, what a weird coincidence: A friend I visited last week just called me to let me know her kids have lice — I saw the kids briefly and didn’t touch heads or share combs with them, so it’s unlikely I picked them up. But of course, ever since I talked to her, I’m itching like mad and convinced I have thousands of bugs roaming through my hair!
My kid got them along with practically all of her schoolmates in first grade. Gyad, what a nightmare. We did the “Rid” thing with the fine-tooth comb, washed all the bedding and stuffed critters, etc. I’m no expert, so who am I to disagree with the CDC, but if kids have active lice and are therefore prone to spreading the critters to other kids, they should go home, if only to spare additional parents the hassle of dealing with lice.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
They do. I heard a student speech on ed reform and she was clever. She said she didn’t want her public school reformed, she wanted it “restored” as in FUNDING. I was cheering.
We need our own ‘r” word :)
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Unfortunately, our political discourse is infested with Teabaggers who claim they want to reform stuff, so we’re stuck with all those unpleasant words.
Anoniminous
@cathyx:
Of course it’s insane.
Between the Right Wing Nutjobs and the Left Wing Nutjobs – both of whom have their own brain-damaged “take” on Public Policy – we’re successfully FUBAR’ing Public institutions — like schools.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
I think people are misinterpreting the CDC’s advice. The “nits” are the eggs that stick to the strands of hair, not the active (adult) lice. So the CDC is recommending that kids be allowed back at school once the active (moving) lice are out of their hair, but that insisting that all of the nits (eggs) also be gone may not be practical since the treatment probably already killed them (so they won’t hatch) but it’s tough to get the damn things off the hair without cutting it.
rikyrah
eeeeekkkk
Mike E
@Kay: Love the show, but missed that one. I picked up bedbugs at my public library and my apartment was soon full of the blood suckers–I had first thought I had fleas once again, since my very elderly landlord was a “cat” lady who put food out for the neighborhood ferals (and attracted raccoons as well) but then I saw one scamper across my sleeve. Fuckers.
Luckily for me, I had recently viewed a good teevee docu on the subject which included people like one you cited from the radio show who went “conventional” with very lackluster results. It takes heat to defeat them, 120F for 10 minutes will do. Or, extreme cryogenic cold, as in the case for library books, ‘splodes ’em. It was the hottest days of summer, I was in an attic apartment, I went on a 4 day vacation and closed up the place with the AC shut off. 107-111F for days works, too. Never saw a one after that, and assiduously avoided my library thereafter.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I think what they’re objecting to is the “no nits” policy, which didn’t let them back in w/out a head check. Apparently the nits get confused with “husks” by schools and “husks” are not catching. Basically they were missing too much school because schools were going nuts with it.
We had a kid here a couple of years ago where his parents treated with kerosene, poor baby.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, but here’s what it says (from Kay’s excerpt above):
Sounds to me like they’re saying kids with crawling head lice should finish out their day, then go home for treatment. Meaning they could potentially spread lice to other kids for the rest of that day. The “no nits” policy may indeed be too stringent, but I don’t see the sense in exposing schoolmates to kids who definitely have crawling head lice, considering what a colossal pain in the ass it is to get rid of them.
kindness
We never had lice as kids. Mom would have dropped dead. My daughter did come home with them when she was about 8. We’d wipe em out then she’d get them again. Eventually it came down to one friend of hers. That was the source. And her friends family wasn’t doing anything it seemed to us. Thankfully Jazzy decided she didn’t like that girl any more after a few months. Never had them again.
My other half teaches and they still send kids home from school early if a child is found to have lice and won’t let them back till they clear an inspection.
Ben Cisco
Nice.
LanceThruster
This story bugs me.
Thlayli
@Mike E:
A steam cleaner will deliver enough heat to kill them instantly.
FlyingToaster
My daughter’s school had professionals come in the second week of school (a company called “NitPickers”) and check all of the kids for head lice. AFAIK, none were found.
I suspect that they’ll be back come spring, but since I gave blanket permission — it’s actually a condition of enrollment — I won’t hear unless something goes wrong.
I think the biggest problem is that you have school nurses or teachers trying to do this job; when I was a kid looking for lice was done by the county nursing service, not our school nurse.
Reform, my eye. I want our local public schools to opt-out of the standardized testing and go it alone. And quit selling off school properties (sold 3, converted one to admin, now we have 3 K-5 grade schools with average class sizes of 27).
Mike E
@Thlayli: Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Anoniminous:
Sadly, no gorilla-on-homind cave painting pr0n has survived since then.
NotMax
Impetigo.
Ivan
There is, of course, that story (can’t find link right now) about the unintended consequences of a no-nits policy: if lice trigger getting sent home, and kids like having an excuse to skip school … well, I’m sure you can fill out the rest.
Mike E
@NotMax: Yep, and Fifth Disease. Preschool was a blast for us when the kid brought home one delight after another. This is why I refuse to
hazeinform new parents, because they usually find out on their own what’s up…best not to terrorize. Though, my standard advice list has, “Play music at pre-kid levels, they’ll adapt; get shampoo/water in their eyes, it’s ‘no tears’ for a reason; and, if you catch them taking a dump in your closet, say ‘Alright! Hey, let’s get it in the potty next time!’ even if it’s on your best shoes.” YMMVThe Fat Kate Middleton
@Kay: My sister and her husband came home with bedbugs after spending eight weeks in Italy. When they got home, she insisted that she and husband strip naked in the garage, then she threw away everything that couldn’t be washed in hot water – luggage, clothing, shoes, camera, even her iPhone IIRC. So, yes, she’s a little … um… alarmist about such matters. Anyway, about a year later she admitted that maybe her response was a little over the top.
Kay
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
I could see it. It depends on what your thing is. I’m irrationally afraid of bats, and there are a lot of bats in NW Ohio. I send my kids upstairs to do a “bat check” before I will go up there in mosquito season, when they’re active. I had a really funny thing happen last weekend where this (now) man who went to high school with my daughter was at the house and I didn’t recognize him when he walked in and he said “I once took a bat out of your house”. I’ll ask anyone for bat help. Complete strangers.
LanceThruster
@Mike E:
xD
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Kay: Oh my, that made me laugh. We have (had) bats in our western Iowa farm home – one came swooping through the living room as we were watching TV one night. Scientist husband always reminds me that they use sonar, so I stood at the entrance to the LR while he opened the front door and stood aside. Bat Boy used his batpowers to turn away from me as I stood there, and headed back through the open door. Needless to say, bats don’t really bother me. If that had been a snake crawling across the floor, though, I doubt I would have ever entered the house again.
lamh36
@rikyrah: okay..This is Def in the category of “white people problems”.
Head lice tend to not occur much if at all in the African American community. I personally have never known any child in my family during my 37 year who ever had a case if head lice. Which is not surprising, even CAN points our that is rarely occurs in the AS community’s
esc
@Kay: I used to live next door to a bar, and I once paid a drunk guy to come into my apartment at 2am and kill a bat for me because it was faster than calling the police. It was obviously ill and flying into things. No regrets.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@lamh36: Interesting! Has any research been done on why this is so?
Betty Cracker
@Kay: My husband wants to put up a bat box to ATTRACT them. For the guano! I’m not particularly afraid of them, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea…
iPad air
Worse word than infest?
ticks!
my nephew has Lyme from those darned aliens.
and the time my dogs came back from exploring the creek bed and they had a bout 100 each. ticks are an alien species from the planet yuck.
J R in WV
I never got lice, but back then kids took a bath every day (EVERY DAY!!!) before bed time, so that probably had something to do with it.
It probably made it possible for Moms to use the same sheets for a whole week!
Coming back from a trip last month, the very last flight home, the flight attendent had red swollen streaks on her face and neck froman allergic reaction to bed bugs. She was going to be staying in the same hotel again that night, and felt sure that management would have taken care of the problem.
I gave her a tube of cortizone ointment I took on the trip, since I could easily get another, and she was “on the road” professionally.
For a week or so every hair that twitched made me look for a bug!
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@Central Planning: Well, she’d just come back from some time with her mother and her mother never made her bathe. So perhaps filthy wasn’t the correct word…unwashed? She obviously had been exposed and then went for several days without washing her hair, which probably gave them time to set up camp. Okay, I have to stop talking about it…I’ve got that icky feeling again.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Bear in mind that bats are also good for eating noxious insects. Given that you live in Florida, I’d assume you’d want all the help you can get on that front.
AdamK
Lousy kids!
Another Holocene Human
@The Fat Kate Middleton: IDK, but just two weeks ago one of my coworker’s was giving an old wive’s tale for why that would be the case that I think involved hair oil (in a tone of towering moral rectitude… I kinda shrugged b/c this blond head had never been cursed with head lice either and I certainly wasn’t following Grandma’s hygiene regimen).
Claimed that brushes don’t spread lice as I’d always been told. All I know is that our school nurses checked us for nits every September when I was a child… ya know, back when schools had school nurses.
Lice do so spread disease–look up “typhus”.
Kay
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
I think I’m afraid of them because they’re silent. You know when a bird gets in and they panic and crash into things? Bats just..swoop, incredibly accurately and completely quietly. It gives me the creeps.
This house attracts flying things. My eldest son once woke me up at 2 AM and said “there’s an owl in the cellar.” I thought I was dreaming. It’s just such a bizarre thing to hear. There was, too. It was a barn owl so not that huge, but the wingspan was incredible. He caught it with a bedsheet.
Pogonip
@lamh36: Why don’t African Americans get lice? What’s your secret?
gelfling545
@Mike E: Oh, yeah. I learned way more that I wanted to know about bedbugs when I was doing some work on a project for a NPO that housed the formerly homeless & disabled. For one thing, I learned that if your going to be in an area where bedbugs are suspected, spray yourself, your clothing & belongings with alcohol on leaving, put non-sprayable things in a sealed plastic bag and dump remove your clothes in the garage or on the porch, stuff them into a plastic bag & rush them directly to the washer for wash & drying at your hottest temp. They can even live inside electronics, paper files or behind your wallpaper. The exterminating company came & gave a training session for all the employees, tenants & people who regularly worked with the tenants. It cost the organization a big hunk of their tight budget to do extermination which has to be ongoing. I itch for days every time I think of it. They also explained the really revolting sex lives of bedbugs.
The company did periodically bring 2 cute little beagles, though, who were trained to spot infestations with amazing accuracy.
rk
My kids had head lice and it was a chore getting rid of them. The youngest had a massive infestation. I had him out in the sun and went through his head with a metal comb and hand picked nits for 3 hrs. My daughter has long hair and the natural solution was to put lots of olive oil in her hair, leave it overnight and then comb out the lice with a the fine metal comb. She uses a flat iron on her hair so the nits were closer to her scalp. Flat iron is actually really good for killing the nits. Repeated it every four days till no more lice were found. There is also no need to wash everything with hot water. All you do is put everything in the dryer at high heat. The heat kills everything. I disagree with the lenient head lice policy. I can’t imagine dealing with constant reinfection.
rikyrah
93-year-old testifies against Wisconsin voter ID law
by Carrie Healey | November 11, 2013 at 4:38 PM
The civil rights organization Advancement Project filed a federal lawsuit, challenging the sate of Wisconsin’s voter ID law.
Lorene Hutchins was among witnesses who have taken the stand to testify.
“I feel there is a strategy to keep minorities and older people from voting,” the 93-year-old said, according to court transcripts. “Most of us who migrated to Northern states do not have birth certificates, a prerequisite for obtaining the photo ID required to vote. I’ve been voting since the 1940′s when I voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It would be devastating to lose the right to vote now, after all these years.”
Hutchins was born at home in Mississippi because hospitals at that time did not accept black patients, and she did not receive a birth certificate.
Katherine Clark, Hutchins’ daughter, spent over $2,000 and several years to obtain birth certificates for both herself and her mother.
http://thegrio.com/2013/11/11/93-year-old-testifies-against-wisconsin-voter-id-law/
Jebediah, RBG
Regarding bedbugs: if they are just in your bed, diatomaceous earth works. Apparently it is so hard and pointy that it cuts them open and they dehydrate. It worked for us. You do need to be careful if you have pets about – IIRC you don’t want them ingesting it. It is cheap and easy. You can get it at the garden store.
Ajabu
@lamh36:
I was wondering if anybody was going to point out that it’s “their thing”.
It’s the accurate genetic reason for us having “nappy” hair.
Being the original people does have its perks after all.
Robert
We had a massive lice outbreak this summer at a very exclusive summer camp. The kids all swim twice a day. Chlorine means nothing.
What it meant was checking campers and counselors for nits, then handing out hairnets to wear if nits were found and e-mailing/phoning the parents to get treatment. NBD. A nuisance only for passing the health inspection at the camp.
Any effort made by specialists and counselors to decrease the outbreak failed miserably. Someone caused minor chemical burns by offering up undiluted tea tree extract to coworkers because she read it fended off lice. It actually does. It just can’t be applied safely without diffusing it in an oil.
Me? I kept the kids at arms distance and built up a barricade of sheet music and instrument stands around my keyboard so the lice couldn’t get near me at theater. We ordered twice as many wigs and hats as needed because we do two productions of each show with two separate casts and didn’t want to risk further spread.
Jennifer
For all you complaining about head lice, you have no idea what it’s like to deal with a truly horrifying infestation…I’m talking scabies. Like lice, they have become resistant to the pesticides that used to wipe them out quickly. Unlike lice, they are microscopic so you can’t see them to get them off of you.
I’ve never had lice, so I can’t compare the itch with that of scabies. Scabies I did have, last May, and I NEVER want to repeat that experience again. There’s an epidemic of it going around now, too. If you’ve never had it, they can be on you for 4 – 6 weeks before you break out in an allergic reaction to their bodies and feces as they burrow in your skin. By that time, you’ve thoroughly infested your surroundings and probably passed it on to anyone who lives in your household – which means it’s going to be that much harder to get rid of them. The itch is indescribable; it never stops and I literally clawed my skin open every place where one had burrowed in. Because they’re so tiny, you can’t see them if one happens to crawl on you from a chair, a toilet seat, an airplane seat, etc etc. I got mine from my sister, who got them from riding around in a car with a friend that in the past has given her head lice – TWICE. I told her that if she EVER got in that girl’s car again that I would never set foot in her house from here on out. Seriously. I got them from sitting in her computer chair for 5 minutes, but of course it was several weeks before I broke out…and because I’m responsible, the first thing I did after I figured out what it was (about 4 days after the itching started) was to call everyone whose home I had been in to warn them. That was when my sister figured out what it was she had – and had passed on to me. Thanks, sis.
For scabies, you have to do DAILY washes or at least hot drying of bed linens, towels, bag all dirty clothes unless they’re going straight to the washer, etc etc. It’s a freaking nightmare. Better yet, you can’t buy the medication over the counter – you’ve got to shell out to go to the doctor, even then, most of them have no idea what to look for, and many of them give bad treatment advice such as “use the cream once” or fail to instruct patients to clean their environment and wash bed linens. The cream just doesn’t work a lot of the time anymore – didn’t for me, even after 3 applications. I finally went down to the feed store and bought ivermectin cattle dip, diluted it with water, and sprayed myself down with it every few days for a couple of weeks. Not only did it finally get rid of the fuckers, but it cost about 1/10th of what it cost to go to the doctor and buy prescription cream that didn’t work.
Here’s the kicker – my sister STILL HAS THEM, after 7 months. Now, part of that is because you can’t tell her a goddamned thing – she knows it all and prefers to take advice from crazy people who post online in the Topix forums and other places…she’s spent hundreds on quack remedies that of course didn’t work, and succeeded only in making the scabies she has resistant to everything known to man. She can’t even get rid of them with ivermectin. I don’t know how much of that is due to the fact that she won’t stick with a cleaning regimen (I stripped sheets and washed them daily in hot water for 6 weeks, in addition to draping furniture with clean sheets daily); all I know is she still has them and has passed them to her granddaughter several times now, to the point where my niece won’t let the baby go to her house. She’s tired of clearing up her scabies only to have her mother re-infect the child. Now Thanksgiving is coming, my mom is going out of town, and I’ve had to tell my sister that they can’t come here and I’m not going there, because I’m not going to go through that crap again.
So if all you’ve had to deal with is some puny *head lice*, count your blessings. The only good thing I can say about scabies is that they aren’t life-threatening – they’re just uncomfortable and embarrassing and gross, and can be damaging to your mental health if you have to deal with them longer than a few weeks. So if you break out with little red bumps that itch like crazy, don’t bother with the doctor – just google “scabies” and compare what’s on your body with the pictures online. Then go to the feed store and get some cattle dip.