by The email arrives on Friday afternoon. The subject line is a three-word horror story: Lice in the camp.
“No,” I say, out loud, even though I’m alone.
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I just flashed back to last year, when my preschooler brought home a bunch of lice and I paid hundreds of dollars to a trained lice removal specialist to calm my panic, and then spent 14 days combing my children’s hair is professional grade. comb, scrutinizing every particle of scalp detritus and suppressing the urge to gag.
This time, mercifully, there are no signs of bugs when I anxiously examine my daughter’s head. But there are plenty of other people who are not so lucky. Just say the word “lice” in a group of parents and you’ll know who’s experienced the scourge: Their faces will turn, their mouths will twist, their shoulders will shoot up in revulsion. This is especially true right now, as summer draws to a close 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 lice always seem to arrive when we are least able to deal with them. If you’ve experienced them even once, chances are you’re still at least in touch with lingering paranoia and phantom itching.
“Every time I see lice in my kids’ hair, I’m like, ‘Let me look through your head,'” says Michelle Mervis, a mother of two in the District whose family has dealt with lice many times, with her counts twice. this summer. “Oh, God, I’ve given them a complex.” She plans to brush her children’s hair regularly between now and the start of the school year, or maybe between now and their teenage years – “They’re getting better at this some point, right?”
We may succeed in our individual battles against the lice, but the war itself has been getting worse since the beginning of mankind, and we are not winning. Our pre-hominid ancestors scratched their heads the same way we do. Lice eggs have been found attached to the petrified hairs of ancient mummies in Egypt and South America. About 3,700 years ago, one desperate soul in Israel made a plea for immortality in a small ivory comb, discovered by archaeologists in 2016: May this product bring out the lice of the hair and the beard. It is, to date, the first human sentence written in an alphabet. (“I suspect the last human sentence will also involve lice,” said one exasperated mom friend, who has battled lice half a dozen times, when I shared this with her.)
They were there when Hannibal and his army crossed the Alps. They were there when both World Wars were fought. It’s now 2024 and we have Mars rovers and artificial intelligence and, yet, lice. We cannot change their reality. Should we try to change the way we think about them?
Nancy Pfund believes so. “I really admire them as creatures that have managed to stay here,” says Pfund, who co-founded Lice Happens, a mobile lice removal service based in the Washington area, after having a few. A sister and her children dealt with lice in 2008. “One way I look at lice, in theory, is as a small gift given to a family that is just a reminder of how precious everyday life is, so all you want back after lice.”
This rings true for Megan Gray, whose child brought home lice four days before Christmas last year. She was exhausted by the chaos of preparing for the holiday, and then all at once eclipsed by a panicked dash to a pharmacy, followed by a furious shampoo, followed by a late night spent combing her son’s hair while he watch many, many episodes of “Bluey.” She succeeded: By the next day, she says, the school nurse could not see a single nit on her son’s head. (There were, however, seven full-grown lice in Gray’s hair.)
In the end, “you’re reminded that all the things you worry about are tomorrow’s problems,” says Gray. “I was really worried about Christmas, and suddenly it wasn’t that important, because I just had to take care of the things in front of me. In a way, it was a gift?” She laughs. “A gift of mind, and being present.” Or perhaps the gift of perspective: “Thank you all that is good and holy that it wasn’t bugs.”
Maybe we should think about lice in that way – because what they are not. They are not bed bugs, ticks, or fleas. They don’t fly, they don’t jump, they can’t live long apart from a human, and they don’t transmit disease. This is information that Pfund emphasizes to clients, she says; she wants them to learn about lice and feels empowered to get rid of them. She doesn’t want parents to feel embarrassed or embarrassed when they find bugs or nits (or lice eggs) on their children’s heads.
“When lice come knocking and we don’t understand them,” says Pfund, “we actually make them worse than ever.”
We tend to think of lice as a childhood problem, but adults are often collateral. Ask Katrina Southard, who, the day before going to the hospital to deliver her child in 2017, hug a friend twice at a party, their heads close together. Southard would learn (much later) that her friend unbeknownst to her had lice, courtesy of her preschool-age child.
“A week or so after I gave birth to my first and only child, my scalp started to itch,” says Southard. For weeks, she thought the itching was just another postpartum symptom among a strange physical constellation; at one point she went into a cosmetic store and mentioned “postpartum scalp itching” to a saleswoman, who told her this was indeed a thing (it’s not), and sold her a hot oil treatment. A few weeks later, Southard scratched her head and removed a live bug from her hair.
A dear friend had just dealt with lice with her children, Southard says, and she came over to comb Southard’s hair, for hours, while Southard nursed her baby. When she remembers this, she is quite moved. “There’s something very telling about that,” she says. “That’s a true friend.“
Now, when Southard thinks of lice, she recalls her connection to her friend, and also to the natural order of things, from which even modern humans cannot escape. “I think we have this sense that we’re disconnected from, or different from, other animals — like we’re outside the environment in some way,” she says. “But when you’re living with other things, you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re all in this together.'”
Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Gainesville, Fla., marvels at the long history of this particular relationship: “As an evolutionary scientist, you consider that lice were with us during our evolution, and it’s amazing the that’s a thing.“
Ascence began studying the DNA of lice in 2010, realizing that the tiny bodies of our parasites contain vital information about the history of their hosts. By analyzing the genetic diversity of more than 270 lice specimens, she and her colleagues identified two distinct genetic groups, and found that some American lice shared genetic components of both – which could result in interbreeding. The scientists hypothesized that one group of lice accompanied the first people who crossed to North America, between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago; and the other came only hundreds of years ago, on the heads of European colonists.
The implications, Ascunce explains, are significant: Lice offer a valuable way to understand where and when our ancestors migrated, how they lived and with whom they interacted. The potential discoveries are remarkable, she says: “If we study more lice from other parts of the world, our data can be combined, and we can answer more questions about human evolution.“
Lice still tell stories about where we’ve been – whether at the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago or on a Boy Scout camping trip last weekend. They are showing us who we really are: exhausted people, overwhelmed by the desperation to find some way to control our daily lives. Lice reveal our place in the animal kingdom, among the many creatures that also have their own personalized strains of parasitic companions. They remind us to appreciate the people in our lives who love us enough (or are compensated enough) to help us with the mundane tasks.
Still, I have to ask Ascence: Will we ever be free from them?
On the video call screen, pauses and half-smiles, thinking of a nuanced answer. She had lice once as a child, growing up in Argentina; her sister had them almost every year, and it drove her mother mad. Ascence’s own daughter never brought home lice – she was lucky. No one wants lice in their own family. But in terms of humanity in general, there’s no sign of lice going anywhere anytime soon.
“They’re a pity,” says Ascunce. Then she really smiled. “But as a researcher, I don’t want them to go away.”
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