The email arrives on a Friday afternoon. The subject line is a three-word horror story: Lice at the campsite.
“No,” I say out loud, even though I’m alone.
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I can’t help but think back to last year when my toddler brought home a head full of lice and I paid hundreds of dollars to a lice removal specialist to quell my panic. Then I spent 14 days carefully combing my children’s hair with a professional comb, examining every bit of scalp debris and suppressing the urge to gag.
This time, thankfully, there’s no sign of insects as I anxiously examine my daughter’s head. But many others aren’t so lucky. Say the word “lice” in a group of parents and you’ll know who’s experienced the plague: Their faces will scrunch up, their mouths will twist, their shoulders will rise in a shudder of disgust. This is especially true now that summer is drawing to a close and children around the world are migrating back to classrooms from camps and family vacations, trailing crowns of parasitic hitchhikers in their wake.
We are in the middle of lice season and lice always seem to arrive at the moment we are least equipped to deal with them. If you have had them even once, chances are you are still feeling a bit of paranoia and phantom itch.
“Every time I see a speck in my kids’ hair, I think, ‘Let me see inside your head,’” says Michelle Mervis, a mother of two in the District whose family has dealt with lice several times, including twice this summer. “Oh my God, I’ve given them a complex.” She plans to comb her kids’ hair regularly between now and the start of the school year, or possibly between now and their teenage years — “They’ll grow out of it anyway some point, right?”
We may triumph in our individual battles against lice, but the war itself has been raging since the dawn of humanity, and we are not winning. Our prehominid ancestors scratched their heads the same way we do. Lice eggs have been found glued to the fossilized hairs of ancient mummies in Egypt and South America. Some 3,700 years ago, a desperate soul in Israel carved a timeless plea into the ivory of a small comb unearthed by archaeologists in 2016: May this tusk remove lice from the hair and beard. It is the first known human sentence written in an alphabet. (“I suspect the last human sentence will also be about lice,” said one anguished mother, who has battled lice a half dozen times, when I shared this fact with her.)
They were there when Hannibal and his army crossed the Alps. They were there when both world wars were fought. Now it’s 2024 and we have Mars rovers and artificial intelligence and, still, lice. We can’t change the reality of it. Should we try to change the way we think about it?
Nancy Pfund believes so. “I’ve developed a pretty deep respect for them as creatures that have perfected the ability to stay here,” says Pfund, who co-founded Lice Happens, a mobile lice removal service in the Washington area, after her twin sister and her children were diagnosed with lice in 2008. “One way I look at lice, in theory, is as a little gift that’s given to a family that’s just a reminder of how precious normal, everyday life is, because that’s all you want back after lice.”
That rings true for Megan Gray, whose preschooler brought home lice four days before Christmas last year. She was preoccupied with the chaos of holiday preparations, only to have it all immediately overshadowed by a panicked dash to the pharmacy, followed by a furious laundry binge, followed by a late night spent combing her son’s hair while he watched many, many episodes of “Bluey.” She pulled it off: The next day, she says, the school nurse couldn’t find a single nit on her son’s head. (There were, however, seven adult lice in Gray’s hair.)
Ultimately, it was a reminder that all the things you worry about are tomorrow’s problems, Gray says. “I had been worrying a lot about Christmas, and suddenly it didn’t matter as much because I just had to deal with what was in front of me. In a way, it was a gift?” She laughs. “A gift of mindfulness and being present.” Or maybe a gift of perspective: “Thank all the good and holy things that it wasn’t bedbugs.”
Maybe we should think about lice that way — as what they are not. They are not bedbugs, ticks, or fleas. They don’t fly, they don’t jump, they can’t survive long without a human head, and they don’t 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 anxious or embarrassed if they find bugs or nits (also called lice eggs) on their children’s heads.
“When lice knock on the door and we don’t understand them,” says Pfund, “we make them even more dangerous than they really are.”
We often think of lice as a childhood problem, but adults are often a side issue. Just ask Katrina Southard, who hugged a friend twice at a party, heads close together, the day before she went to the hospital to give birth in 2017. Southard would (much) later discover that her friend unknowingly had lice, thanks to 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 itch was just another postpartum symptom in a constellation of physical oddities; at one point, she walked into a beauty supply store and mentioned “postpartum scalp itch” to a saleswoman, who told her that it was indeed a thing (it’s not a thing) and sold her a hot oil treatment. A few weeks after that, Southard scratched her head and plucked a live insect out of her hair.
A dear friend had just had a lice infestation with her children, Southard says, and she came over and combed Southard’s hair for hours while Southard nursed her baby. When she thinks back on it, she’s actually quite touched. “There’s something very intimate about it,” she says. “That’s a real friend.“
When Southard thinks about lice now, she remembers a sense of connection — to her friend, and also to the natural order of things that even modern humans can’t escape. “I think we have this sense of disconnection from, or difference from, other animals — like we’re somehow outside the environment,” she says. “But when you have other things on you, you think, ‘Oh, I guess we’re all in this together.’”
Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Gainesville, Florida, marvels at the long history of this particular relationship: “As an evolutionary scientist, you realize that lice have always been around throughout our evolution, and that’s amazing.“
Ascunce began 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—possibly the result of interbreeding. The scientists hypothesized that one group of lice accompanied the first humans to invade North America, between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago; and the other group didn’t arrive until hundreds of years ago, on the heads of European settlers.
The implications are significant, Ascunce explains: Lice offer a meaningful way to understand where and when our ancestors migrated, how they lived, and who they interacted with. The potential discoveries are exciting, she says: “If we study more lice from other parts of the world, our data can be combined and we can answer even more questions about human evolution.“
Lice still tell stories about where we’ve been—whether it’s the Bering Land Bridge tens of thousands of years ago or a Boy Scout camping trip last weekend. They show us who we really are: exhausted, overwhelmed humans desperately trying to regain some sense of control over our daily lives. Lice reveal our place in the animal kingdom, among the countless creatures that also have their own personalized tribes of parasitic companions. They remind us to appreciate the people in our lives who love us enough (or are compensated well enough) to help us with even the most loathsome tasks.
Still I must ask Ascension: shall we ever be freed from it?
On the video call screen, she pauses and half-smiles, considering a nuanced answer. She had lice as a child, growing up in Argentina; her sister had them almost every year, and it drove their mother crazy. Ascunce’s own daughter never brought lice home—she was luckier. No one wants lice in their own household. But as for humanity in general, lice show no signs of going away anytime soon.
“They’re annoying,” Ascunce says. Then she smiles genuinely. “But as a researcher, I don’t want them to disappear.”
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