Woman's Hour - Parenting Podcast: Nits

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

All you need to know about nits

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Women's Hour Parenting Podcast, which today is about nits. Always a popular subject, never quite go away, do they, nits? We talk now to Louise Somerville, a listener based in Somerset, who felt that people these days don't know enough about the subject and some schools are not dealing with nits effectively. So we talked to her and we get the expert view of

entomologist Richard Jones and Joanna Ibarra, programme advisor at the charity Hygiene Concern. First of all, you'll hear from Louise. Well, my eldest is 29, he's nearly 30. I also have a son who's 26 and I have an 11-year-old, which is why head lice is a current issue for me. And you believe, and I think this is interesting, that there's a sort of feminist side to this. That's correct. When I first came across head lice, my now sort of very grown-up child was at a small rural village primary school and the letter came home from school and it was a really clear letter I remember being in shock at the time and thinking oh my goodness what's this the infestation feeling scared about it feeling a little bit vulnerable about it yeah was grateful because not only was there a very clear letter written about the lifespan how to deal with them what the technique was but there was also an

illustration with drawings followed by a note saying nip along to the school office and there were combs available two pounds each so it it was not a stigma it wasn't a stigma at that time everybody had the letter the conversations were happening more and wet combing with conditioner was definitely the recommended method. And now the situation seems quite different. Because? My best guess is that my youngest son has been at a junior school with two male headteachers and my best guess is that they are not combing their children's hair and having spoken to a few parents recently I've discovered

that it appears to be the mums that are mostly on the case with dealing with the headcombing and I'm thinking that those headteachers are not recognising that this is a public health issue that it really affects families and our children it takes a lot of time to deal with it. And the sooner we are notified of an outbreak, the sooner we can deal with it. All right, stay with us, Louise. Let's bring in entomologist Richard Jones and Joanna Ibarra, who's from Community Hygiene Concern. Richard, first of all, when head lice, well, when did they first start? That's an idiotic question, but they seem to have always been with us.

Oh, they have, yes. Head lice have been with humans even before we were human. So many hundreds of thousands of years. So they've adapted incredibly well to survive so long on our heads. Yeah. Well, and they used to be told they only like clean hair. True? Absolutely not. No, they have. fact they uh any hair at all the the cleanliness of the hair is it is completely irrelevant um one of the things i think people don't realize is how active head lice are how fast they are we've got this idea of these this these vermin living amongst our the stalks of our hair on our heads um but actually if you ever see one moving around,

I wanted to photograph one many years ago, and I combed one out of my children's hair and put it on some snipped ends of hair on an envelope. And it was very difficult following the beast up and down. They're supremely adapted. If you look at them under a microscope, they're always a delight. They've got the most amazing claws, which are exactly the right size to fit on

to human hair. I don't make a practice of asking men to send me photographs for a string of reasons, but I wouldn't mind seeing that photograph of that knit, if you don't mind, Richard, if that's possible. I'll see if I can hook it out. It was quite a few years ago, but it should still be around. I think we'd like to share that with the Woman's Hour audience.

Okay, so all different sorts of hair, all ethnicities, every single human can have nits. There's no doubt about that. Absolutely none at all. So, yes, wherever you are in the world, there are nits. Right. And to get rid of them, first of all, to be sort of counterintuitive, does it matter if you've got them?

Probably not on head lice. The thing, one of the biological factors to take in is that head lice and body lice are very similar. And whether we call them one species or two species is pretty arbitrary. And we're very lucky that head lice really don't cause us any fuss. But body lice, which I think is luckily something that we've eradicated now, spread diseases, mostly through their feces, getting into cuts in the skin. And there are awful reports, usually in times of war or famine or mass migration,

terrible disasters where people have got nothing except the clothes they lie lie down in and those clothes are infested in the reports of 50 000 lice being retrieved from these people and at that point it's unlikely that anemia through blood loss is going to be an issue but there was certainly the allergic reaction to the saliva that they inject, which has anticoagulant properties. That is a real issue. And that's why, of course, people feel lousy. They get irritable.

They have a slight temperature. They can't focus. And this is why, you know, the nitty gritty, of course, which is in your hair, which is the droppings and the idea of a numb skull because you lost the feeling in your skull because you've been bitten so many times. But these all show that really seriously heavy infestations can have an effect. Right. I did not know that the term numb skull originated there. Joanne Ibarra from Community Hygiene Concern, what do you advise if a family has nits, what's the solution? Well, first let's pick up on the fact that lice move very quickly in dry hair. But if they are bathed in moisture, if they're really wet, they stay still. And the easiest way to get your hair really wet is to wash it with ordinary shampoo and then put on any conditioner and that will

keep the lice really wet and sodden and soaking while you are facilitated with untangling and straightening the hair with an ordinary wide-tooth comb. And then you can come in with a bright yellow bug-buster comb and hook them out very easily. And that's the way that you know that you've got life. Yeah, now this can take... And that's the way that you know that you've got life yeah now this can take easy way to address it well you say easy it's quite time consuming isn't it depending on the length of hair yes but uh you've got to bear in mind that if you don't detect life and this is the way to detect it when you've got a low number of lice on the head, unbeknown to you, because they're probably not even causing telltale itching,

your child might be passing them on and picking them up from other children whose parents don't know that their children have got lice and they're going round and round and round, whose parents don't know that their children have got lice. And they're going round and round and round, which means that lots of people end up doing successive treatments, one after another, when they realise that there's a problem. So we introduced bug-busting, wet-combing detection of life days. The next one is Halloween, 31st of October. And the simplest way for schools to bring parents back in

and keep them informed and get their united action going is to inform them about our helpline. There's a one-to-one helpline. All right. Well, yeah, OK. I'm sure we can put links up on our website so people can get more information about that. I'm quite interested, Louise, in your theory about height and knits. Can you just remind me of that? Well, it's something I saw on Twitter this morning. I looked on Twitter to see if any men were talking about head lice or if, again, it was just the women.

And one mum put that her child, Touchwood, had never had an infestation of head lice and another parent responded with, is your child tall? Yeah. And? And it turns out that, according to the mums on Twitter, that is your child tall? Yeah. And? And it turns out that according to the mums on Twitter, that if your child is tall, their heads are further away from the other children

and that life seem to move down. But I'm also particularly interested in what Richard said about the speed and how Joanna countered that by saying that when your hair is very wet, they don't move as fast. So I'm going to put myself in the firing line of embarrassment now and say that when combing my hair a couple of weeks ago, because we've had a recent outbreak of head lice in July during lockdown, strangely enough, I was combing on one side and then I felt that there was an itch or a movement on the other side of my head. So then I moved the comb to the other side, and I'm practically thinking, this is ridiculous.

Head lice don't have a brain. They can't move away from the comb. Is there any point in combing one side of my head and then quickly moving to the other side? Or should I be going all the way round the head in a more orderly fashion? Very briefly, that's one for Richard. Yes, several centimetres a second, a couple of centimetres a second they can move. They're incredibly fast.

Yes, it's funny how you can sometimes feel them crawling around. I'm quite proud, I think, to be the only man who's ever combed and knit a headlouse out of his hair and then presented it as an exhibit that same day at a meeting of a national entomological society how proud you are your whole family must be they they are yes i remind them of this all the time um the speed they move is incredible and i think that's something to take into account when thinking about um headlice transferring around the classroom and

as a good biogeography analogy that you can borrow here and that your child's head is not a lone island they don't have an infestation that you have to cope with they're part of an archipelago and a head louse can start on one child and possibly move through half a dozen other heads before it gets to the end of the day in a classroom. They really are incredibly active. And because they're very small, people miss that key biological point. And that's actually how infestations get around so fast. Entomologist Richard Jones, Joanna Ibarra, Programme Advisor at the charity Hygiene Concern, and Louise Somerville, who is a very passionate listener in Somerset.

Thanks to all of them. And if there's something you'd like us to talk about on the Women's Hour Parenting Podcast, contact the programme via our website. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know.

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