The lice will always win
The email arrives on a Friday afternoon. The subject line is a three-word horror story: Lice at camp.
“No,” I say, out loud, even though I am alone.
I immediately flash back to last year, when my preschooler brought a headful of lice home and I paid hundreds of dollars to a trained lice-removal specialist to quell my panic, followed by 14 days spent dutifully combing my children’s hair with a professional-grade comb, scrutinizing every particle of scalp detritus and repressing the urge to gag.
This time, mercifully, there are no signs of bugs when I anxiously examine my daughter’s head. But plenty of others aren’t as lucky. Just say the word “lice” in a group of parents and you’ll know who has experienced the scourge: Their faces will squinch, their mouths will twist, their shoulders will hitch upward in a shudder of revulsion. This is especially the case right now, as summer nears its end and kids everywhere migrate from camps and family vacations back to classrooms, with crowns of parasitic hitchhikers in tow.
We are in peak lice season, and the lice seem to arrive, always, at the moment when we are least equipped to deal with them. If you’ve endured them even once, odds are you still have at least a touch of lingering paranoia and phantom itching.
“Every time I see a speck in my kids’ hair, I’m like, ‘Let me look through your head,’ ” says Michelle Mervis, a mom of two in Washington, D.C., whose family has dealt with lice numerous times, including twice this summer. “Oh, my God, I’ve given them a complex.” She’s planning to comb her kids’ hair regularly between now and the start of the school year, or possibly between now and their teenage years – “They do outgrow this at some point, right?”
We might triumph in our individual battles against lice, but the war itself has been raging since the dawn of humankind, and we are not winning. Our prehominid ancestors scratched at their heads the same way we do. Lice eggs have been found glued to the petrified hairs of ancient mummies in Egypt and South America. About 3,700 years ago, one desperate soul in Israel etched a timeless plea into the ivory of a small comb, unearthed by archaeologists in 2016: May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard. It is, to date, the first known human sentence written in an alphabet.
They were there when Hannibal and his army crossed the Alps. They were there when both World Wars were fought. Now it is 2024 and we have Mars rovers and artificial intelligence and, still, lice. We can’t change the reality of them. Should we try to change the way we think about them?
Nancy Pfund believes so. “I’ve developed a pretty deep respect for them as creatures that have perfected the ability to continue to be here,” says Pfund, who co-founded Lice Happens, a mobile lice-removal service based in the Washington area, after her twin sister and her children dealt with lice in 2008. “One way I look at lice, in theory, is as a little gift given to a family that is just a reminder of how precious normal, day-to-day life is, because that’s all you want back after lice.”
This feels true to Megan Gray, whose kindergartner brought lice home four days before Christmas last year. She’d been consumed by the chaos of preparing for the holiday, and then all of that was instantly eclipsed by a panicked dash to a pharmacy, followed by furious shampooing, followed by a late night spent combing her son’s hair while he watched many, many episodes of “Bluey.” She was successful: By the next day, she says, the school nurse couldn’t spot a single nit on her son’s head. (There were, however, seven adult lice in Gray’s hair.)
In the end, “it was a reminder that all the things you’re worrying about are tomorrow’s problems,” Gray says. “I had been worrying a lot about Christmas, and that mattered less, suddenly, because I had to just take care of what was in front of me. In a way, it was a gift?” She laughs. “A gift of mindfulness, and being present.” Or perhaps a gift of perspective: “Thank all that is good and holy that it was not bedbugs.”
Maybe we should think of lice that way – as what they are not. They are not bedbugs, or ticks, or fleas. They do not fly, they do not jump, they cannot survive for long apart from a human head, and they do not transmit disease. This is information Pfund emphasizes to clients, she says; she wants them to learn about lice and feel empowered to get rid of them. She doesn’t want parents to feel freaked out or ashamed when they find bugs or nits (a.k.a. lice eggs) on their kids’ heads.
“When lice come knocking and we don’t understand them,” Pfund says, “we make them more formidable than they really are.”
We tend to consider lice a childhood problem, but adults are frequent collateral. Ask Katrina Southard, who, the day before going to the hospital to deliver her baby in 2017, hugged a friend twice at a party, their heads close together. Southard would learn (much) later that her friend unknowingly had lice, courtesy of her preschool-age child.
“A week or so after I gave birth to my first and only baby, my scalp started itching,” Southard says. For weeks, she thought the itching was just another postpartum symptom among a constellation of physical weirdnesses; at one point she wandered into a cosmetic store and mentioned “postpartum scalp itching” to a saleswoman, who told her this was indeed a thing (it is not a thing), and sold her a hot oil treatment. A few weeks after that, Southard scratched her head and plucked a live bug from her hair.
A dear friend had just dealt with lice with her kids, Southard says, and she came over to comb out Southard’s hair, for hours, while Southard nursed her baby. When she remembers this, she’s actually rather moved. “There is something very intimate about that,” she says. “That’s a real friend.”
Now, when Southard thinks of lice, she recalls a sense of connection – to her friend, and also to the natural order of things, from which even modern humans can’t escape. “I think we have this sense that we’re disconnected from, or different from, other animals – like we’re outside the environment somehow,” she says. “But when you have other things living on you, you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess we are all here together.’”
Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary geneticist at the U.S. Agriculture Department in Gainesville, Florida, marvels at the long history of this particular relationship: “As an evolutionary scientist, you consider that lice have been there with us throughout our evolution, and that’s amazing.”
Ascunce started studying lice DNA in 2010, understanding that the tiny bodies of our parasites contain vital information about the history of their hosts. By analyzing the genetic variation of more than 270 lice specimens, she and her colleagues identified two distinct genetic groups, and found that some lice from the Americas had genetic components of both – potentially the result of interbreeding. The scientists hypothesized one group of lice had accompanied the first humans to cross into North America, between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago; and the other arrived hundreds of years ago, on the heads of European colonizers.
The implications are significant, Ascunce explains: Lice offer a meaningful way to understand where and when our ancestors migrated, how they lived and with whom they interacted. The potential discoveries are thrilling, she says: “If we study more lice from other parts of the world, then our data can be combined, and we can answer even more questions about human evolution.”
Lice are still telling stories of where we’ve been – whether that’s the Bering Land Bridge tens of thousands of years ago or a Boy Scout camping trip last weekend. They are showing us who we really are: exhausted, overwhelmed people desperate to reclaim some modicum of control over our daily lives. Lice reveal our place in the animal kingdom, among the myriad creatures who also have their own personalized strains of parasitic companions. They remind us to appreciate the people in our life who love us enough (or are well compensated enough) to help us with the grossest of tasks.
Still, I have to ask Ascunce: Will we ever be free of them?
On the video call screen, she pauses and half-smiles, considering a nuanced response.
“They are an annoyance,” Ascunce says. Then she smiles in earnest. “But as a researcher, I don’t want them to disappear.”