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    The Little Book of Nits
    The Little Book of Nits
    The Little Book of Nits
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    The Little Book of Nits

    By Richard Jones and Justine Crow

    ()

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    About this ebook

    It's not something easily owned up to, but every family in the country will have come into contact with head lice, either through embarrassing personal experience or by grizzly tales told by friends and relations. The world is teeming with head lice.

    Both a manual and an entertaining read, The Little Book of Nits is small enough to be purchased as an impulse buy, but also serious enough for it to be a useful addition to the home reference library. Broken down into bite-sized pieces are full details of the history and biology of head lice, advice on how to spot an infestation and the many different ways of dealing with it, natural versus chemical treatments, gadgets and combs, and other aspects of our relationship with these annoying arthropods. Inside, we'll learn that most of what you have been told or think you know is wrong. Is it any wonder we can't get rid of them?

    Throughout, the book is illuminated with amusing anecdotes, myths, pictures, cartoons, silly stories and interesting facts. Presented clearly and objectively, it is a quick reference tool for parents and carers, and an entertaining little guide to these most irritating of insect.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 7, 2012
    ISBN9781408155516
    The Little Book of Nits
    Author

    Richard Jones

    Richard Jones is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, a past president of the British Entomological Society and author of several books on insects, wildlife and gardening. He also contributes articles on insects and the environment to several high-profile newspapers and magazines (including the Guardian, BBC Wildlife and Gardener's World Magazine), and appears regularly on radio and television.

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      Book preview

      The Little Book of Nits - Richard Jones

      Don’t Panic and Don’t Get Muddled

      it’s not a monster…

      Oh dear. One of the children has come home from school with the usual head louse letter. It may be helpful and suggest all manner of preparations and treatments to get rid of the blighters. Or it might accuse you of being a bad parent and endangering the health, safety and good name of the school. Whatever. DON’T PANIC!

      Much of what you know, or think you know, about head lice is going to be wrong. There are so many quack cures and old wives’ tales that sorting fact from fiction is sometimes very difficult.

      But congratulations, you have taken the right first step in picking up this little book. It’s time to start getting our facts straight.

      First, head lice are very common. They are particularly common amongst schoolchildren. Rough estimates suggest that almost 40% of children will get head lice at some point between the ages of three and ten.

      Second, they are easy to catch almost as easy as catching a cold. Anyone from presidents to paupers can catch a cold, and they can get head lice, too.

      Third, head lice are not choosy about whose head they infest. From baker to barrister, we can all get head lice; even entomologists get head lice.

      Lastly, they can be got rid of.

      We take care not to peddle any particular product with this book. And we distance ourselves from anyone else promoting particular potions, poisons or gadgets. But there is only one sure-fire way of ridding yourselves and your families of head lice. That is to understand what these tiny critters are, how they live, how they breed and how they move about.

      Then you can set about removing them

      Don’t Get

      Muddled

      James, (aged six) on his way home from school: Mum, I had a letter from the teacher to give you, but I lost it.

      Edwina: Oh! What did it say?

      James: It said you have to look in my hair for woodlice.

      James can be forgiven his childish muddle. ‘Louse’ is an old word and it’s used for all sorts of small, mean, crawling creatures. Apart from woodlice – the familiar, domed crustaceans living under logs in the garden – there are hoglice (water woodlice), fish-lice (flat prawn-like fish parasites), plant-lice (a bit like greenflies), bark-lice (a bit like greenflies on tree trunks), booklice (inhabitants of old books) and, of course, head lice.

      It’s some of the grown-up muddles we have to be careful of, though. Despite the fact that head lice have been with us since prehistory, and we’ve had plenty of time to learn all about them, there is still much to discover and still a huge amount of myth and misinformation spread around. Even authoritative information dished out by doctors, government departments, schools, education authorities and (sorry, guys) entomologists is often littered with errors.

      Head lice are a bit annoying but if they come into your life, you do not have to worry about disinfecting combs and hairbrushes; you will not have to shampoo the carpets or bath the dog; you should not feel dirty or diseased; you should not be embarrassed or feel unlucky. You just need to discover a few basic facts, and getting rid of them will then be all the easier.

      One easy muddle, to start with, is over the terms ‘nit’ and ‘louse’. In general conversation, the two words are used interchangeably. And sometimes that’s OK. But when someone like a teacher, a nurse, a doctor or an entomologist starts explaining how to get rid of them, it becomes very important to know that the two are, in fact, very different. And neither is anything to do with woodlice.

      A nit is a louse egg. More particularly, it is an empty louse egg-shell, because by the time the nit is spotted, the tiny louseling has hatched out and crawled off across the scalp. Strictly speaking, an egg with a louse embryo still inside does not have its own name, but let’s not split hairs over this (or the nits attached to them).

      A nit is tiny. At 0.8 by 0.3mm, it’s about the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. To put a nit in perspective, a hen’s egg is over one and a half million times the size, a goose egg is four million times as big and an ostrich egg – should you have one lying about in the kitchen – is 43 million times the size of a nit.

      The louse egg is smooth, sleek and shaped like a rugby ball. It has a broad rimmed neck and a flip-top lid (the ‘operculum’), which has about 16 small holes, through which the developing louse embryo breathes.

      It takes about a week from egg laying to louse hatching. The optimum temperature for development is 31°C, which is coincidentally very similar to the usual scalp temperature of 33°C. Louse eggs do not hatch below 22°C. Unfortunately, unless you sleep with your head in the fridge, there is no way you can get your scalp down to this temperature.

      Oddly, the lid is not quite big enough for the louse hatchling to climb through. Instead, it starts swallowing down air and expelling it at the other end, inside the base of the eggshell. This builds up pressure inside the nit, enough to push out the louse like a cork from a champagne bottle.

      There is no pop and no airborne trajectory, but what a neat trick

      WHAT IS A HEAD LOUSE?

      Know your enemy and give it the right name: Pediculus capitis.

      The human head louse Pediculus capitis is a tiny (3.3mm at the biggest), narrow, wingless, bloodsucking insect with short antennae and stout legs, each ending with a large claw. In life, the head louse is a dull pale cream colour, perfectly described in one Victorian monograph as ‘cadaverous

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