Head Lice Epidemics Are Breaking Out in Schools Across the U.S.

Head lice are nothing new, but the recent uptick in lice outbreaks could be due in large part to new policy changes.

Head lice in children are rampant in schools throughout the country. The CDC reports that an estimated six to 12 million young people get head lice each year, and there are indications that these itchy bugs are growing widely resistant to the insecticides commonly used to treat them.

A head lice outbreak earlier this month in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, school district was called “unprecedented,” as 100 children were found to have active lice infestations.

While head lice are nothing new and affect children regardless of socioeconomic status or geography, the recent uptick in lice outbreaks could be due in large part to new policy changes that encourage children to attend school with active head lice.

In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics (A.A.P.) issued a report on head lice urging school districts to abandon their previous “no-nit” policies that prevented children from attending school when they had active “nits,” or louse eggs. The A.A.P. argued that these “no-nit” policies potentially infringed on the civil liberties of students by keeping these children out of school for what is not technically an “infectious” medical issue. Lice infestations can occur when people are in close proximity, share articles of clothing, or otherwise come into contact with someone with active lice, but lice are not “infectious” in strict medical terms.

An October New York Times article on head lice reports: “The A.A.P. has fought hard against ‘no nit’ policies in schools, in the interest of reducing the school absence associated with head lice; the C.D.C. agrees, and schools are increasingly unlikely to exclude children for nits…”

These new lice policies can lead to widespread outbreaks, as schools often avoid checking for lice or notifying parents if there is an infestation. A Washington Post article this week on the topic reveals the current lackadaisical attitude toward lice: “Because of [the new policy], they no longer checked students, did not call parents to pick up their children and did not notify the parents there had been a report. My daughter’s teacher did not send out a note, email or even include the infestation in the newsletter that week.”

Parents are increasingly fed-up with these new school district policies that they feel contribute to mounting lice infestations. In Nevada this week, nearly 6,500 parents signed a petition demanding that the Washoe County School District change its new lice policy that the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, “allows students with lice or louse eggs to ride school buses and participate in all activities even if lice are not treated.” 

A mom who treated her daughter for head lice 15 times in the last school year started the petition, frustrated by the new district policy that allows children with active lice to continue to attend school.

It really comes down to accountability. Lice can be a common part of childhood, but parents need to take responsibility for effectively treating their children’s lice before sending them back to school, and school districts need to re-examine absurd policies that unnecessarily spread these bugs to others.

Lice On The Plane: Grounds For Grounding Passengers? It Happened To One Family On Delta

Here’s a word of advice if you’re planning to fly Delta Air Lines:

Do not scratch your head during the flight, except in the privacy of a restroom.

If you’re scratching your head as to why you shouldn’t scratch your head in public aboard a Delta jet, here’s a cautionary tale for you:

On a Delta flight from Paris to Nashville by way of Minneapolis last weekend, flight attendants told a family of five that they could not board the plane for the last leg of their trip home until they went to a Minneapolis hospital emergency department to be treated for head lice, all because the 6-year-old middle son began scratching his head mid-flight while waiting to use the bathroom.

The boy's mother checked to see why he was scratching and concluded that he had lice, and then several flight attendants rushed over to peer at the kid's head and gasp, "Oh, my God, he has lice." When the plane landed in Minneapolis, the flight attendants forced the family to stay on the plane while all the other passengers got off. The family was allowed off only after two "medical personnel" came on board to take the children's temperature. Huh?

I know all this because the kid's father, Clay Travis, happens to be both a lawyer and a writer, so, of course, he wrote and posted an approximately 2,500-word piece about the incident on Outkick the Coverage. (I emailed Travis to check in on his family, but he didn't respond.)

UPDATE

Travis emailed me Sunday afternoon. In his column, he had written that he and his youngest son, who's 2, were examined for head lice after the plane landed in Minneapolis and found to have none. I had asked Travis who examined them, and he said he had no idea. "It was an examination that was forced upon us by the Delta flight attendant," he told me. "There's no way Delta can defend that decision or suggest their employees should be in the business of demanding medical examination of minor children who fly on their airplanes."

Delta spokesman Anthony Black supplied me with a prepared statement about the Travis family's experience, but it raised more questions than it answered:

“Delta flight attendants are trained to [perform] a first-responder role as outlined by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. Direct examination of a passenger outside of [the] first-responder emergency role is not within their scope.

So Delta considers head lice to be an emergency? "There is not a specific policy on dealing with lice," the airline's statement went on to say.

If there's no specific policy about lice, weren't the flight attendants acting outside of their scope, to use the airline's language, when they banned the Travis family? "Our flight attendants rely on their broad skill sets to make recommendations around passengers' fitness-to-fly," Black told me in an email. "I do not have specific details on what the flight attendants did with the child. It appears the flight was met by local paramedics."

Paramedics? Seriously?

Black also directed me to Delta's "conditions for passenger removal," a.k.a. Rule 35, "Refusal to Transport," Section F, "Passenger's Conduct or Condition"

"Delta may refuse to transport any passenger, or may remove any passenger from its aircraft, when refusal to transport or removal of the passenger is reasonably necessary in Delta's sole discretion for the passenger's comfort or safety, for the comfort or safety of other passengers or Delta employees," Section F states. It then lists 11 situations in which "Delta may refuse to transport or may remove passengers from its aircraft." It includes "when the passenger is barefoot" (No. 2) and "when the passenger has a malodorous condition" (No. 6).

As Black said, there is no mention of lice, but he cited situation No. 5 to explain Delta's treatment of the Travis family: "When the passenger has a contagious disease that may be transmissible to other passengers during the normal course of the flight."

Contagious disease? Sorry, but I think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is more of an authority than Delta Air Lines on what constitutes a contagious disease, and this is what the CDC has to say: "Head lice are not known to transmit any disease and therefore are not considered a health hazard." And the American Academy of Pediatrics says children should not be kept out of school just because they have head lice or nits (eggs) in their hair. I have to assume that the pediatricians, if asked, would also say that children should not be kept off of airplanes just because they have head lice or someone suspects they do.

Delta's actions made little sense to me, so I contacted my go-to head lice expert, Richard Pollack, a public health entomologist—bug specialist—based at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. As Pollack describes it, his main day job is senior environmental public health officer for Harvard University, which occupies more than 300 buildings in several different cities. He helps set policies about how to deal with such issues as head lice. He is also the president and chief scientific officer of a company called IdentifyUS, which, as you might have guessed, is in the business of identifying pests and providing guidance on how to manage them.

Pollack and I go way back, probably to the time my now 18-year-old daughter was kicked out of school in second grade—on picture day, no less—because she had dead lice eggs, or nits, in her long brown hair (yes, they were dead—I’d treated her with malathion, a pesticide sprayed on crops to prevent mosquito infestation that’s relatively safe and virtually 100% effective in killing head lice and nits). But that’s a story for another day. (If you're interested, I, like Travis, felt compelled to write about my child's lice incident.)

“I had seen some references to this curious and troubling incident, but I wasn’t sure it was genuine,” Pollack said in response to my sending him the link to Travis’s column. “I’ve dealt many times with creatures found on planes, passengers and luggage."

In those cases, typically, a flight crew member notified airline officials that someone on the aircraft had or was suspected of having head lice, Pollack said. "Mass hysteria broke out." Once, a 747 sat parked on the end of the tarmac for three or four days because none of the flight crew or cleaning crew would dare to step foot on it. What could they spray to kill the lice? the airline asked. Oh, Pollack reassured the company, probably nothing could survive inside a plane that had sat for days on a hot tarmac.

"Rarely have logic and good sense prevailed," Pollack told me. "If lice could laugh, they’d be in absolute hysterics.”

Lice That Can Resist Drugs Have Infested Half the States in the U.S.

Head lice season has begun—the time of year when millions of creepy, crawly itchy bugs take up residence in kids’ scalps. A parent's immediate reaction to a lice epidemic might be to head to the drugstore for a fine-tooth comb and an over-the-counter remedy. But one biologist begs you to reconsider.

Kyong Sup Yoon at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has devoted much of his career to figuring out how to tackle the lice infestation that’s been picking up steam in the U.S. in recent years. According to his preliminary numbers, at least 25 states play host to lice that are resistant to commonly available over-the-counter treatments.

The trouble is widespread use of pyrethroids, a family of insecticides used to kill indoor and outdoor pests from mosquitoes to bed bugs. The more often insects get exposed to these compounds, the greater the chances some will mutate and develop resistance to the drugs, then go on to pass that resistance to their offspring. In fact, says Yoon, it's hard to come by lice that lack pyrethroid resistance these days.

“Do the math,” says Yoon: Just one louse that manages to survive a pyrethroid treatment can live for up to a month and lay five eggs a day. “Multiply that by an elementary school, a community, and soon you’ve got plenty of resistant lice.”

Lice prevention is nothing new. Archaeologists have found evidence of lice combs at pre-Columbian sites in Chile, and U.S. pioneers made lice combs out of bone in the early 19th century. A 1916 medical journal even recommends dousing the head in “gasoline, or kerosene and vinegar, equal parts” to get rid of head lice.
To collect the thousands of modern lice needed for his research, Yoon turned to the professionals. With the help of expert Katie Sheperd, who trains people in the art and science of lice removal, Yoon created a nationwide network of volunteer pickers, who use combs and ethanol-filled vials to collect samples and record demographic information. Yoon and his team then study the lice in the lab to look for drug-resistant mutations.

While Yoon’s team has confirmed resistance in only 25 states, they believe the reality is likely much worse, as they report in a paper presented today at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. In 104 out of 109 lice populations already analyzed, they found high levels of gene mutations that make lice indifferent to drugstore treatments. The team is still analyzing data from the other 25 states.

“Parents who go to the drugstore to treat lice are part of the problem,” cautions Yoon. Overuse—and occasional misuse—of the same drug type only ups the odds that resistant bugs will develop and thrive. “Resistant genes are oversaturated in this nation.”

He acknowledges that newer, non-pyrethroid treatments are more expensive and more difficult to obtain; parents can only purchase them with a prescription from lice pros and dermatologists. But he adds that while body lice act as a disease vector, head lice do not. Getting them probably won’t give a kid much more than a case of the itchies and a day off of school, so it's worth it to take the time to seek prescription treatments. At the same time, we need to make sure our best weapons stay effective. Even now, Yoon’s colleagues are exploring ways to improve access to newer lice treatments without watering down their efficacy over time.

Next, Yoon and his team will focus on whether drug-resistant lice in the United States have also developed metabolic changes that can make future outbreaks even harder to control. He won’t be surprised if those changes are already well underway. After all, says Yoon, when humans overuse head lice remedies, they contribute to real change in the bugs' genes—no matter how good our itchy intentions. 

The truth about lice and how to protect your kids

Many of us remember whispering about the classmate who left school early because they had lice, the evasive bug that make scalps their homes. The unlucky, banished kid considered dirty and unkempt, the object of our pity and disgust.

The idea lice are the direct consequence of poor personal hygiene is one of the many myths about the age-old condition. Krista Lauer, medical director of Lice Clinics of America, said lice do not discriminate between the clean and dirty members of our society, or the rich and poor.

Lice are "equal opportunity infesters," said Lauer, who argues it's about time we dispel those stigmas.

Lice infect millions each year

Lice infestations are most common in young children, who often contract the bugs through the way they play and interact with one another.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports about 6 million to 12 million infestations occur in kids ages 3 through 11 years old each year. 

'Super lice' are more prevalent

Odds are if you get lice, you'll get what is colloquially called “super lice”, an evolved type that has grown resistant to over-the-counter treatments after years of exposure to the chemicals. 

Lauer said research published last year in the Journal of Medical Entomology found 98% percent of head lice collected in 48 states were resistant to lice treatment products. 

Lice do not jump, swim or fly

Lice crawl. They can't jump, fly or swim.

They're bugs of opportunity, Lauer said, spreading mostly through head-to-head contact. 

"That's why we see lice more commonly in young children," Lauer said. "Whenever there's an opportunity for one head to another, that provides the opportunity for lice to move from one head to the next."

Lice are spread in children by playing in close proximity, at sleepovers, while playing video games closely, and even, posing for group pictures.

What about selfies?

Lauer said selfies can be a cause of spreading lice. Anecdotally, she explained, doctors are seeing lice in older kids.

Hats, helmets and hairbrushes

Lice latch onto human hair follicles and rely on sucking blood from a patient's scalp in order to survive. If they're removed from a scalp, they can't live very long. 

Therefore, Lauer said, it's "extremely rare" a person will get lice by putting on someone's hat, using someone else's hairbrush or putting on a helmet.

In fact, when it comes to athletics, Lauer said people should use another person's helmet if the alternative is no protection. Why? Head injuries are true medical problems while a lice infestation is a "medical nuisance" with no long-term health effects aside from scratching and poor sleep.

Lice do not carry disease.

What about water?

Taking a swim can't get rid of lice, which go into a type of hibernation state when in water. Lice can survive up to six hours submerged.

What to look for

• Parents doing a head check on their children should look for live bugs living close to the scalp and small eggs attached to hair follicles.

• A scratchy kid is a good indicator of lice. People with lice also may have a hard time sleeping and may have sores on their head from scratching.

• Parents should look for such symptoms particularly after kids have been together, such as after a family vacation or summer camps.

The next step is getting diagnosed by a doctor, pediatric nurse or at lice clinic, which administer a lice removal kit. Removal includes rubbing a gel-like oil on the head, which kills the lice bugs and a special comb to pull the eggs from the hair.

How to avoid lice

Particularly for parents, avoiding head lice is very important. A kid with head lice can easily infect the entire family.

• Parents should try to educate kids about not having head-to-head contact with other children and to avoid sharing hats and helmets if possible. 

• If a lice infestation is found, parents should call the parents of other children who may be infected.

"Don't be embarrassed, this is common," she said. "If anything, it means your kids are engaged with play with other people."

Lice Shouldn't Keep Kids from School, Doctors Say

Head lice are annoying, but they don't actually make people sick, and children with the condition should not be kept away from school, according to new guidelines from a leading group of pediatricians.

The guidelines, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, say that although head lice can cause itching, they are not known to spread disease, and the insects are not very likely to spread from one child to another within a classroom. Rather, it is usually direct head-to-head contact that spreads lice.

For this reason, "no healthy child should be excluded from school or allowed to miss school time because of head lice or nits," the guidelines say. (Nits are the eggs of head lice.) Most doctors who care for children agree that school policies requiring children to be free from nits before returning to school should be abandoned, the AAP says.

In addition, screening kids at schools for head lice does not reduce the occurrence of the condition in classrooms over time, so routine screenings at schools should be discouraged, the AAP says. However, parents should still regularly check their children for head lice, and school nurses may check children who have symptoms of lice. 

Once a person is diagnosed with head lice, everyone in the family should be checked for the condition, the AAP says. Lice are usually transmitted by direct contact, so it's less likely that people will get lice from touching household items, but it is still wise to clean all hair-care items and bedding used by the person who had lice, the guidelines say.

It is recommended to teach children not to share items such as combs, brushes and hats, although such precautions are unlikely to prevent all cases of head lice, the AAP says.

Kids shouldn’t be sent home for lice, but schools can’t ignore the issue either

Last night, my 3-year-old daughter made soft, singing noises while she dipped a plastic boat in and out of the bubbles of her bath, oblivious to my actions of raking a fine-toothed metal comb through her mop of curls that reach her shoulders when they are wet.

Just a few months ago, the sight of a hairbrush in my hand caused her to shriek. Bath time was a battle. I was certain her first memories would be the pain from my tugging tangles out of her hair. Then, that fateful day came when the sun shone on her little forehead, still from sleep in her car seat. I bent over to carefully unbuckle her and saw the telltale bug crawling through her blond curls. Head lice.

I was no stranger to this terror. My oldest daughter seems to attract them. Maybe it is her mass of light-brown hair, so thick I can barely get a comb through it. Maybe it is her many invitations to sleepovers with several friends where they try on five different outfits. When I first discovered my oldest had them, my youngest was a newborn. I was on my own, barely making ends meet, scrambling to find work I could do at home to pay rent. Dropping $20 on a tiny bottle of shampoo that claimed to kill the bugs that had invaded our house was an expense I could not afford. Plus, I had to wash and dry everything I could — including stuffed animals — on high heat, vacuum, and repeat a week later. I bagged most of it instead.

My oldest had been in kindergarten that year, and I faintly remembered a line in the classroom newsletter telling me they had a report of lice. There was not any mention of ways to check for it, or how to prevent it. This was several years ago, when the school nurse came around with her flashlight to check every head. I knew if she found any, she would send those kids home because of the district’s “No Nits” policy. So, I didn’t worry. Lice happened to other people. Not my daughter, who stayed in the bath so long, her fingers wrinkled before I convinced her to get out of the tub.

When I found lice last spring, I sent an email to my daughter’s teacher. I half expected her to tell me that, even though I had used the shampoo and spent an hour combing her hair, my daughter would have to stay at home until the nits were gone. The school nurse called me instead.

“We don’t send students home anymore,” she cheerfully said, explaining that only 10 percent of lice are transferred at school. Because of this, they no longer checked students, did not call parents to pick up their children and did not notify the parents there had been a report. My daughter’s teacher did not send out a note, email or even include the infestation in the newsletter that week.

I applauded the idea of not sending children home. Low-income families don’t need the added hardship of missing work on top of the expense of ridding themselves of lice and nits, along with the stigma their kid would experience of being the one with cooties. The expense of lost wages, in addition to the added expense of laundry and buying shampoos and kits, could mean less rent money, not just an inconvenient afternoon. But shouldn’t there be a system in place to notify parents in the chance their child is part of that 10 percent?

As kids are back in school, connecting with friends, and putting their heads together, either by taking selfies or studying, lice transferring from one head to the next seems inevitable. But there was no mention of that possibility in the student handbook my daughter’s school sent home.

In deciding to allow students who have lice to come to school, the flip side should be educating parents on what to look for, how to prevent them and how to get rid of them without spending $50 on chemical-laden shampoos, salon treatments and loads of laundry. Keeping lice out of schools should be a herd immunity type of attitude. Schools should send home brochures with a plastic comb attached in an envelope. If every parent knew that the best way to prevent lice from spreading is by looking for them, cases decrease dramatically.

Nobody wants to admit their kid is the one with lice. Not only because of the work involved in getting rid of them, but because lice are still associated with dirt, grime, neglect and often poverty. Yet, when stomach bugs run rampant, we all accept that it will run its course and we will be spending a day doing laundry along with everyone else. If parents admitted they are part of the 6 million to 12 million cases of lice reported a year, maybe it’ll be on par with stomach bugs, and not shrouded in secrecy.

More than that, I want a way for parents to notify the school their child has lice, anonymously if needed. I want to get a text message every time this happens so I know to check more than once a week for a while. If parents know how many times others are finding lice on their kids’ heads, maybe other parents will not hide their own discoveries in shame.

NYC Schools have a “No Head Lice” policy.

Can my child go to school with head lice?

• NYC Schools have a “No Head Lice” policy. Students who have live head lice are not allowed to go to school until they are lice-free. Students with nits are still allowed to attend.

• Students may return to school the day after treatment for head lice as long as there are no live lice upon re-inspection by designated school personnel. 

• Students will be re-inspected by a school worker 14 days after the treatment to make sure there are no live head lice.

What are head lice?

• Head lice are small insects with six legs. They are usually the size of a sesame seed (the seeds on burger buns). 

• Lice live on or very close to the scalp. They won’t wander far down the hair shafts for very long. 

• Lice can only live on human beings; you can’t catch them from animals. 

• Nits are not the same thing as lice. Lice are the insects which move around the head. Nits are egg cases laid by lice. Nits are smaller than a pin head and are pearly white. 

• If you have nits it doesn’t always mean that you have head lice. When you have got rid of all the lice, the nits will stay stuck to the hair until it grows out. 

• You only have head lice if you can find a living, moving louse (not a nit) on the scalp.

Are head lice contagious?

• Anybody can get head lice by coming into contact with an infected person, but spread of head lice requires direct head to head contact. Head lice can’t swim, fly, hop or jump. 

• Head lice can be spread as long as lice or eggs remain alive on the infected person’s clothing. 

• Head lice are generally caught from close family and friends in the home and community, and not from the school.

Can head lice be prevented?

• The best way to stop a head lice infection is for families to learn how to check their own heads. This way they can find any lice before they have a chance to breed. 

• Instruct children not to share hats, combs, and brushes. They should avoid touching an infested person’s unlaundered clothing and bedding. 

What are the symptoms? 

• Head lice symptoms often start to appear 2 to 3 weeks after the head lice infection. Usually, the first indication of an infection is itching or scratching in the area of the body where the lice feed. Examine your child for head lice if (s)he is scratching at the back of the head or around the ears. Examine your child for crab lice if (s)he feels itchy around the genital area. 

What do I do if I suspect my child has head lice?

• Check Your Child’s Head for Lice

• Wash your child’s hair well and then dry it with a towel. The hair should be damp, but not dripping. 

• Make sure you have good light. Daylight is best. 

• Comb the hair with an ordinary comb. 

• Using the teeth of a fine tooth comb, touch the skin of the scalp at the top of the head. Brush the comb carefully towards the edge of the hair. 

• Look carefully at the teeth of the comb in good light. 

• Do this over and over again from the top of the head to the edge of the hair in all directions, working around the head. 

• Do this for several minutes. It takes at least 10 to 15 minutes to do it properly for your child’s head. 

• If there are head lice, you will find one or more lice on the teeth of the comb. 

• Head lice are little insects with moving legs. They are often not much bigger than a pin head, but may be as big as a sesame seed (the seeds on burger buns). Nits are smaller than a pin head and are pearly white.

• If your child only has nits (lice eggs) make sure you have brushed them all out with the fine tooth comb. 

• Read the next section for what to do if your child has adult lice (not nits). 

If you Find Adult Lice (Not Nits) 

• Treat All Family Members Who Have Lice.

• Check the heads of all the people in your home. 

• Only treat the people who have living, moving lice (not nits). If a family member has nits, carefully brush them out with a fine-tooth comb. 

• Treat all of the people in your home who have adult lice at the same time. 

Get the Lice Out of Your Home

• Clean all bedding, towels and clothing from the infected individual with soap and hot water (140 degrees F). Place them in a dryer for at least 20 minutes to help kill any remaining lice. 

• Dry-clean all clothes that need to be dry-cleaned. 

• Seal the infested individual's stuffed toys, and other infested items that can’t be laundered, in a plastic bag. Leave them for 10 days to allow all lice to die of starvation. 

• Get rid of, or soak combs and hairbrushes in rubbing alcohol or the medicated shampoo used to kill lice. 

• Throw out any hair accessories, such as hair elastics and ribbons. 

• Thoroughly vacuum carpets and upholstered furniture. 

• Pets cannot become infested with head and body lice, so no precaution is required.

Got Lice? Come On In.

My kids’ school lets students with head lice stay in class. What a great policy!

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably gotten the dreaded call from the school nurse, letting you know that your child has lice. It happened to our older daughter in kindergarten, and then again two years later when our youngest was in the same grade. Each head lice infestation was a mini nightmare: a work and school day lost to early pickup, chemical shampoos, vacuuming, and endless combing for nits (eggs). The days after, spent worrying that a stray louse might mean another call from the nurse and another day out of school. And that call always came: Your daughter has lice again. She’ll be waiting for you in the office. Last year we spent a couple hundred dollars on a proffesional lice remover, just because we could no longer face the hours every night we needed to spend nit-picking.

At many schools, any discovery of live lice in a child’s hair warrants a phone call and the immediate removal of the child from school. At some schools, the child may return the next day if the parents have treated the child’s hair—that is, shampooed it to kill live lice. But in schools with “no-nit” policies, a child can’t return unless every last tiny louse egg has been combed from her hair—and schools may check returning students and send them home if any nits are found.

But then, this fall, everything changed. The schools here in Arlington, Va., have adopted what you might call a live-and-let-lice policy. No child will be sent home for lice or for nits. If a child has lice in her hair, the nurse will contact parents but send the child back to the classroom for the rest of the day. Parents are expected to treat the lice, but no one is checking in to enforce this expectation. No classes or groups will be screened for bugs. “No healthy child,” the policy reads, “should be excluded from or miss school because of head lice.”

When I told friends in other school districts about the shift in our school’s lice plan, their jaws dropped. That’s amazing, they said. Finally, they said. And, How can I persuade my school to do the same thing? But my friends are gross, so you may, understandably, have a different reaction to this news. Like, Ew, a school is letting a bunch of bug-covered, itchy kids rub heads in the classroom?

Sorry, your response is wrong. Arlington’s new stance on lice is being adopted by schools all over the country, encouraged by the American Academy of Pediatrics and then National Association of school Nurses. And its the right one. Lice are not particularly contagious, they hurt basically no one, and they’re not a public health risk. Lice don’t actually matter. It’s high time that squeamish parents and school administrators stop acting like they do.

Let’s start with many schools’ long-standing no-nits policies—policies that say kids can’t return to school unless every last tiny louse egg has been combed from their hair. “No-nit policies don’t make any medical or scientific sense,” said Dr. Barbara Frankowski, professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont. Frankowski, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ study recommending changes in school lice policies, told me that, as any parent who has tried to remove nits knows, the eggs are firmly cemented to a child’s individual strands of hair. “They’re not going anywhere,” she said, “and pose no risk to other children.”

But even parents who understand the logic of not checking endlessly for nits get nervous about sending a child upon whom the nurse has just discovered live lice back to the classroom for the rest of the day. Shouldn’t those children go home so they won’t spread the lice to other kids? “If you find live lice during the school day, it’s likely that child has had lice for weeks,” said Carolyn Duff, the president of the National Association of School Nurses and the nurse at an elementary school in Columbia, S.C. “Allowing that child to remain in the classroom for a few more hours is not putting children at risk.”

After all, despite what you may think, “It’s not that easy to get lice!” Duff exclaimed. “They don’t fly. They don’t jump. They can barely crawl through your scalp. They can only spread through head to head contact, and children in schools don’t usually have head-to-head contact.” Even transmission through hats or hairbrushes is difficult—it can happen in families where such sharing is commonplace, but much less frequently in schools. (According to the experts I talked to, children are much more likely to spread lice during sleepovers or playdates, or at sleepaway camp.)

And even if they were highly contagious: The point that both the AAP and the NASN want to make is that it’s far more important to keep kids in school than it is to send them home in the hope of stopping the spread of lice. Because, again, lice don’t hurt anyone. “We’ve heard stories of kids missing weeks of school because of lice, even being held back a grade,” said Frankowski. “It’s unfair to kids. It’s unfair to parents who work or who have other difficulties that don’t allow them to go through hours of delousing.”

If your school still sends kids home for lice or (God forbid) for nits, what can you do? Find out who makes the decisions on those policies. Sometimes it’s a school-by-school choice, which means you can collect all the relevant scientific information and talk to your principal. (Consider enlisting your school nurse, who almost certainly agrees with you, to help argue the case.)

Sometimes these policy decisions go through the school board. “I don’t want to disparage school boards,” said Frankowski. “But they don’t always make policy connected to what’s scientific—sometimes it’s just what’s easiest, or what they think parents want.” So you need to convince your school board that what parents want is a policy based on science, on expert recommendations, and on making life saner for busy parents.

Who would possibly disagree? Well, there are definitely parents who do. They can find support from Deborah Altschuler, the president and co-founder of the National Pediculosis Association, a nonprofit with a website touting the benefits of no-nit policies. In a phone interview, Altschuler told me that the school policy question was “a minefield” and said there is “a small club of people who follow the idea that there is some kind of scientific basis for allowing children with lice back in school.” She disagrees: “It’s a communicable disease that is easily transmitted among kids. We want to send kids to school lice- and nit-free, rather than lowering our standards to accommodate those who can’t do it for whatever reason.”

When I asked Altschuler about the AAP and NASN’s rejection of no-nit policies, she accused the organizations of being overly influenced by lice-chemical manufacturers. (For what it’s worth, Altschuler funds the anti-chemical National Pediculosis Association  through sales of the LiceMeister nit comb.)

Altschuler’s claim that lice transmit disease—that they are, themselves, a disease—is not supported by most scientists. In general, experts say, parents stress out way too much about head lice. “Head lice are a fact of life. It happens. It’s not a health issue, really,” said Marian Harmon, the school health bureau chief for Arlington County’s public health division who signed off on our schools’ new policy. “It’s not a sign of poor hygiene. It’s not an infection. It’s not a communicable disease. We treat it for the comfort of the child and the family. It shouldn’t be escalated to such a high priority.”

What I wondered after talking with all these experts is whether lice even need to be treated at all. Treatment’s expensive, it can expose your kids to pesticides, it takes forever, and all it does is rid your child of a basically harmless pest—and then only until the inevitable next time it shows up. I certainly didn’t get any of the experts I spoke with to come right out and say that you can pretty much ignore lice. They all note that parents want their children to be lice-free, regardless of whether the lice pose any actual threat. “It’s an emotional issue!” allowed the NASN’s Duff. “It’s a live bug crawling on the head of your child.” But I wonder if emotions aren’t getting in the way of common sense. After all, as Frankowski wryly noted, “No one’s ever died from a head louse infestation.”

That’s what I often found myself muttering in years past, as my wife and I spent work days and weeknights washing and combing and washing and combing the heads of perfectly healthy children. In an educational environment in which intervention is the default, a message from a school district announcing that its new policy is for everyone to just relax is extremely welcome. My kids need to be in school to learn, and to play with their friends, and to build their bright futures, and to stay out of my hair. I don’t need them sent home because of the harmless things crawling in theirs.