On Oct. 31, while American children go door to door hunting for treats, British children will be hunting for bugs in their hair.
The date marks National Bug Busting Day in the United Kingdom, an event established several years ago to confront a head lice infestation so widespread that it’s being called a nationwide epidemic.
How bad is the head lice situation in the U.K.?
It’s so bad that there are now head lice in the House of Commons. Three members of Parliament (two Labor, one Liberal Democrat) have admitted publicly that they’ve had the itchy little bugs themselves.
It’s so bad that the head lice hot line in London is often shut down because overwhelmed workers can’t handle the volume of calls.
It’s so bad that it is estimated that anywhere from 40 to 100 percent of all British schoolchildren can expect at least one — but more probably several — head lice infestations during the course of their primary school years.
(Comparative figures are sketchy, but in America the level of annual head lice treatment sales indicates between 13 and 26 percent of all U.S. children aged 13 and under need treatment; in the United Kingdom, the figure is 65 percent.)
“It’s gotten out of hand,” complains Patricia Gray, the visiting nurse at the working-to-middle class Brackenbury primary school in west London. In the playground, she has seen “head lice crawling all over children’s’ hair. They are larger now. Very visible.”
“In the western part of Surrey we have had parents in tears on the phone about this; they can’t get rid of them,” said communicable disease expert John Simpson. Last spring, he became chair of a special national “head louse working group” formed by health workers to confront what all agree is a burgeoning problem.
Not that the United Kingdom is unique, Simpson and other experts say. Virtually anywhere in the world that has hairy heads has head lice. But a convergence of factors in Great Britain currently seem to be giving the largely harmless but socially stigmatizing pests the upper hand, er, leg.
Everyone here has a favorite culprit. For many British parents, it’s the school nurse. Parents blame school nurses for the lice outbreak because they no longer inspect individual little heads, as they did decades ago, but now instead prefer to send out head lice brochures or conduct head lice control meetings.
Until the early 1980s, British school nurses were routinely called “nit nurses” because they spent the bulk of their days looking for nits–empty lice egg casings in children’s’ hair. They then would immediately notify parents if any were found. In some instances, children were not allowed back to school until the lice were gone.
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“It would help if you had the nit nurse back,” said London mother Sue James, who can recall having her own head regularly inspected by a school nurse 40 years ago. Back then, James never had head lice herself and can recall only” one or two cases” of fellow classmates who did.
Now, James estimates, her 6-year-old daughter already has developed 20 separate head lice infestations. “It just keeps going on and on,” James said with sigh.
But British school nurses themselves are loath to return to the nit nurse days. Not only was head inspection inefficient and time-consuming, they say, but now a shrinking number of school nurses has much more frightening things like AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases to worry about in the student populations they oversee.
“Should nurses go back to nit-picking? Absolutely not!” said Kate Green of the Queens Nursing Institute. “The reason is that you can check lines and lines of heads in the school, and by the time you get to the back of the queue someone has reinfected someone in the front.”
School nurses themselves blame both parents and general practitioners for the head lice outbreak. Budget and time-harried National Health System doctors don’t seem interested in lice or their treatment, the nurses complain.