Lice | Hacker News Reader

Lice

granta.com

44 pointslibrary12 comments

This is culturally fascinating to me as schools in India do not consider a lice infestation in any student as a major hygiene issue and raise a hue and cry about it (like I presume some western schools do?). They treat it as a personal issue, something that is annoying. Some teacher may inform the parent if they suspect a student has lice, or even offer tips to the affected student on how to deal with it, but they never made a big deal about it or publicised it. It was accepted as one of the things everyone goes through once in a while. That said, there certainly is a light social stigma associated with having lice, and we too have experienced what the author went through while our parents tried to delouse us. I recall someone telling me that even the dangerous DDT was popular 3-4 decades back in my country for such purpose!

The parents are informed if there are lice in school. So then you check your kids hair more often and by special shampoo for it. The information about lice is accompaigned by ask to do exactly that - check kids hair and if they are found work to get rid of it.

The result is that not everyone goes through live, only few unlucky kids do. Basically, it prevents spread. The lice themselves keep existing, cause spread is not zero.

On the downside, extermination of such parasites which humans have hosted for generations, may have led to prevalence of allergies [1].

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16997-freedom-from-li...

Can anyone explain why lice are not yet exterminated in first-world countries at least?

You only need one person to reinfect everyone else, there is no immunity, and you can't reliably rid the whole population of lice. Even if you did, a single tourist could reintroduce it.

But it certainly is not as big a problem as it once was, when I was a kid 30+ years ago you still got TV ads about anti-lice shampoo, as it was still a common enough problem. This is definitely not the case anymore.

> This is definitely not the case anymore.

Except, surprisingly, Sweden where I live now. Lice outbreaks at schools are a very common thing. This surprised me, as this wasn't a thing even in my own ass-backwards country of Moldova.

It’s a common thing in German schools and kindergarten, we’ve been through that twice at least. I’d be surprised if that was different in Moldova, I’d rather expect that there was more stigma attached and less people talked about it or similar effects.

I recall lice breakouts at my UK school. (Though now I have to remind myself that I'm galloping towards middle age and that was at least thirty years ago.)

The "nit nurse" coming to the school was a big deal. I only remember it happening once or twice (it was probably every year on some predetermined date) but each time a whispered thrill went through the whole school. It was like a celestial visitation.

You have to remember that lice outbreaks have nothing to do with hygiene or high standards of living per se. Merely close proximity of people.

Stigma. Misinformation. Disinformation. Classism. Etc.

It ends up being the poorest of the poor who keep alive vermin and other health issues. If they admit to having such issues, we punish them rather than help them resolve it.

Education is a known means to combat poverty, probably because it makes feasible to find what I think of as "middle class solutions" to myriad issues, including health and hygiene issues. Poor people often have a lack of knowledge and that lack of knowledge fosters problems and there are systemic barriers to educating them because we punish them rather than help them if they admit to having certain kinds of problems.

So they hide them and they don't get educated and so forth.

You sometimes see ugly jokes about "The third world country of America" because there are parts of the US where poverty is rampant, infrastructure is falling apart, etc. I imagine most first world countries have some areas of intractable poverty (though perhaps not all -- some stories suggest some countries are successfully resolving issues like homelessness).

They’re pretty common in Australia and have evolved resistance to many chemical treatments, to the extent that the recommended treatment is combing with conditioner, but you only need one or two eggs to be missed to restart the cycle. Plus kids often don’t notice they have lice until they have a lot of lice, so the touching heads together which happens a lot with smaller kids spreads lice fast across a group. Basically they are really hard to completely eradicate.

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