New York City Life Of lice and men By Bob Yampolsky	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
小学校のシラミ駆除対策 筆者の子供が通う学校でアタマジラミが発生し、学校中が大騒ぎになっています。アタマジラミは、かゆいだけで健康に害は及ぼしません。でも、たいていの公立学校は、児童の頭皮にシラミが見つかった場合、駆除するまで登校を許さないという厳しい決まりを守っています。ところで、この嫌われ者のシラミと人間のかかわりは古代までさかのぼることをご存じですか？

We've had another outbreak of lice at my kids' school. The first word of it came in an e-mail last Sunday night from the mother of an infected classmate of my daughter's. The e-mail was sent to all the families in the class.

It's an awkward thing to announce — my child is infested, so yours may be as well, but the mother, an Englishwoman, was rather cheerful about it, saying that she felt she ought to let us know and that her daughter now had a smart, short haircut. Next came an e-mail from the mother of another infected girl, and then one from the teacher, telling us that all the children would be checked in the morning.

True, they drink our blood and live out their lives on our scalps, and true, they can make a scalp extremely itchy, but head lice, in fact, don't really cause any health problems. The adults are tiny and quick and difficult to spot. A lice infestation is usually identified by the presence of eggs, called nits, which are glossy little things that are glued to the base of hair shafts. Lice prefer clean hair to dirty hair.

Head lice cannot fly or jump; they can't even be carried by pets. There is only one environment that they can live in: the human scalp, and they are passed on from one person to another by direct or indirect (i.e., via a hat or comb) contact. Children in pre-k through to third grade are the most likely to get it, and those with long hair are most vulnerable. It is estimated that between 6 and 12 million U.S. children get head lice in the course of the year.

My kids have gotten lice a couple times; and once, the whole family got it. We were like a pack of monkeys, picking bugs out of each other's fur. There's a special lice-killing shampoo, which is really not shampoo but an insecticide that you apply to your head, and a special extra-fine-toothed comb for picking out nits. And sheets, towels, clothes — everything has to be washed.

But for parents, the biggest threat posed by lice may be this: Public schools in New York, as in most of the country, have a "no-nit policy." If a single nit is found on your head, you go home, and you are not allowed back until you are nit-free.

Last year, when we arrived at school one day, the parents in my daughter's class were detained, and made to wait until their child underwent a lice examination.

There had been no advance warning this time. One child after another was sent away. There was quite a commotion as parents, many of whom were about to go off to work, tried to figure out what to do with their kids. That week, during the peak of the infestation, more than half the kids stayed home.

And then, finally, there is the stigma of having lice. The Parents' Guide to Head Lice, put out by the New York City Department of Health and distributed to parents by the school, goes to great lengths to assure us that "head lice are not related to poor hygiene." But this stigma is something deep-rooted in our culture. It doesn't help, to begin with, that there are two other types of lice besides head lice — body lice and pubic lice, the former being associated with insufficient bathing and the latter with promiscuous sex. This stigma is even ingrained in the language: A louse (which is the singular of lice, just as mouse is the singular of mice) is a name for a contemptible person, and the root meaning of the adjective lousy is "infested with lice."

As it turned out, we were lucky this time. My daughter had a hair inspection every day last week, and passed each time. Others, of course, were not so lucky. One morning I saw Cynthia, a mother of a kindergartner getting off the bus, and she was saying to anyone who listened, "I spent nine hours doing laundry yesterday. I washed everything. And I had to spend $45 (¥5,975) on shampoo. And you know, I don't think she even had lice." 11As a last resort (or first resort, perhaps, for those with money), there are professional "nit pickers," who in New York charge $65 (¥8,775) an hour. On Tuesday, in the midst of the infestation, the mother who sent that second e-mail sent a follow-up. She knew a wonderful woman, who worked for a nit-picking company, but would come to your apartment on the side, for less money, provided that you do not tell the company.

Lice, for all their lousiness, have an ancient pedigree: They appear in the Bible as one of the 10 plagues, and mummified lice have been found in the tombs of Pharaohs. Today there are Web sites dedicated to them. So they have spanned the entire range of human civilization. For this reason, I can almost feel a bit of respect for them: All those thousands of years, living just on human scalps, and now thriving in the schools of New York. It looks as if they will be here for a while longer. They are showing increasing resistance to the medicines used against them; the most popular over-the-counter lice shampoo is said to kill fewer than 10 percent of the lice it comes in contact with. The only really effective way of getting rid of them is to pick them off one by one with your fingers, in the same way as they did in the days of Moses.

Shukan ST: June 7, 2002

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