Tiny bugs can be hugely troublesome

May 6, 2006

Brenda Kahn Special to The Chronicle
Special to The Chronicle


There is a four-letter word that strikes terror in the hearts of parents everywhere, or at least in my little corner of the East Bay. It is a scourge that interrupts your life for days on end, costs you endless hours and dollars, and is nearly unbeatable.

I'm talking about lice, or more specifically, head lice. This plague crosses all neighborhoods and socioeconomic strata. It targets everyone equally and shows no mercy. It has no regard for hygiene, and if anything, clean hair seems to act as a magnet for infestation rather than a deterrent.

And the lice epidemic seems to be particularly virulent and resistant to treatment this year.

Lice have been spreading around my kids' elementary school like, well, lice. The lice season has extended beyond the fall, back-to-school period and has been replaying in our circle like an endless loop.

When I called Kaiser, the advice nurse told me that the popular over-the-counter treatment doesn't work against this strain unless the kid wears it for 10 or 12 hours overnight instead of the recommended 10 minutes. Even then, that's just the start of treatment.

Over the past few weeks, our house has been turned upside down in the effort to rid our family of these tiny, nearly invisible parasites.

After two protracted infestations in two years, I've become an amateur lice expert. I can wield my special metal lice comb with the best of them, and can spot a nit -- that's an egg for the uninitiated -- with my bare eyes. And I have developed my own hard-won theories about how to beat the little buggers.

When it comes to treating lice, it's the wild, wild West. Each man or woman is on his or her own, with no proven road map to follow. The professional advice is conflicting and usually ineffective. And then there's the embarrassment factor. Although kids are more apt to get lice than a cold -- that's my casual observation -- no one wants to admit that his or her household has been struck. The stigma is still strong. And if you do admit to friends or family that you or your kid has had a close encounter of the lice kind, be prepared to be treated like a leper, only worse.

For while leprosy takes weeks or months of exposure to develop, lice require only casual and brief contact to spread. The bugs are built for survival and rapid proliferation, and surely will inherit the Earth. They can survive hours bathed in the chemicals supposedly designed to kill them. They are seemingly impervious to water, and no amount of bathing can dislodge them or drown them. Their eggs cling to the hair shaft with a natural superglue so strong that if I could patent it, I'd be a multimillionaire.

In a matter of a few days, one louse can turn its host's head into a walking colony teeming with offspring at various stages of development, from larval to full, breeding adults.

And they go about their business like stealth bombers, moving at the speed of light and remaining invisible to the naked eye. By the time the lice make their presence known by causing you to itch, you have a really, really bad case.

In the end, after you've spent upward of $100 on useless, noxious, lice-busting shampoos and cream rinses for your family, wasted countless hours washing all your bedding and clothes -- probably several times over -- and spent a small fortune sending all the unwashables to the dry cleaner, you'll come to the conclusion that I did: The only halfway effective strategy is to make like a gorilla and manually pick through each other's hair, flushing the live bugs down the toilet and cutting out the strands of hair when you find an egg attached.

It takes a good half hour or more to go through a kid's head, and once isn't enough. You have to do it twice daily for a couple of weeks at least, while the child squirms and screams that you're yanking her hair. And if you want to be on the safe side, you'll give yourself the same treatment. On the bright side, there's nothing like communal nit-picking to bring a family close together.

Even after you've been through several rounds of this routine, you'll have a sneaking suspicion that you didn't get them all. For weeks and months, you'll experience phantom itching, and low-grade anxiety that you're passing unseen bugs onto unsuspecting friends. Just about the time life gets back to some semblance of normalcy and the whole ordeal begins to fade in your memory, it's time for summer camp, and a whole new lice season begins.

Which makes me wonder: If the combined forces of corporate America and the medical profession can't beat lice, god help us when a truly deadly plague like Asian bird flu hits the West Coast.