Warning: the following column may cause itching of the scalp. Do not panic. This condition is known as “formication,” the feeling that your skin is covered with creepy-crawlies. It’s perfectly normal and can be treated by gentle scratching, or, if you prefer, by rolling up this newspaper and whacking yourself on the head with it.

Not for the first time, our daughter came home last week with a fine case of head lice.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Girls are between two and four times more likely to get lice than boys, and she’s still in the range of ages (between 4 and 14) most conducive to an infestation.

Since I just used the word “infestation” practically in the same breath as “daughter,” let me take a moment to leap to her defense and respond to a few of the common misconceptions surrounding Pediculus humanus capitis, the lowly human head louse.

1. She should have washed her filthy hair. Actually, she washes her hair with some regularity. But it wouldn’t make much difference if she hadn’t. A shampooed louse is simply a clean louse. Normal shampoo doesn’t bother them at all.

2. She shouldn’t have curled up with the dog. Snuggling up with Brooke, the basset hound, didn’t increase her chance of getting or spreading lice. Human head lice poo-poo all other creatures, including hairy mammals who ride adorably low to the ground.

3. She shouldn’t have shared brushes, hats, helmets, or headphones with her friends at school. She didn’t. Well, maybe headphones. But even if she had, what matters most is direct hair-to-hair contact, not the sharing of stuff that has merely touched the hair.

4. Her room shouldn’t be a complete pig sty. This is actually true, but for the sake of common decency, not for the louse reason. Her room is pretty revolting, and even though she’s been making some progress lately in cleaning it up, I don’t mind calling her out and publicly embarrassing her on this point. Lucky for us, a pig sty of a room isn’t a big attraction to a louse. All they care about is hanging out on your scalp, where they can cop delicious blood meals.

5. We should rename her “Typhoid Nina.” The head louse, while disgusting, isn’t a carrier of dangerous disease, unlike the body louse, which is a vector for typhus. On the other hand, “Typhoid Nina” does have a nice ring to it.

6. We should shave her head without a moment’s delay. Again, this may have a certain appeal to a parent contemplating his daughter’s pig sty of a room. And it will certainly cure her of head lice, since the little buggers need to hang onto something with their itty-bitty lobster claws. But it’s hardly necessary. There are plenty of other ways to get rid of lice, including the liberal application of neurotoxins!

7. You should never apply neurotoxins to your child’s head. In our household, we tend to lean toward organic approaches. The eradication of insects, however, brings out the chemical warrior in us. In my tender years, when I came home with a head full of lice, we used Kwell shampoo, which was a dilution of lindane, a popular agricultural insecticide. Lindane is a neurotoxin that works pretty well on lice. Unfortunately, neurotoxins work on human beings, too, so lindane has been relegated to a “second-line” of defense against lice. If the over-the-counter products, which are based on a naturally occurring neurotoxin in the seed casing of the chrysanthemum, don’t do the trick, you can always fall back on lindane, or its cousin malathion. Bottom line: neurotoxins are good, especially organic ones!

8. You should tie her to a chair and comb her flowing locks with a dwarfish nit comb for at least twelve hours a day. Not my idea of fun, but maybe if she doesn’t finish cleaning her room…If you have strong objections to neurotoxins — even the relatively harmless organic ones – you can eradicate lice using strictly mechanical means. But you’ll be signing up for a month of nightly combings. By week two, you might find yourself contemplating number 6 on this list.

One final note: writers are just as vulnerable to formication as any one else – perhaps more so, in light of their active imaginations. You should know that in writing this piece, my scalp got itchy to the point of breaking out the nit comb, running it through my thinning hair, and obsessively studying the result with the little magnifying glass on my Swiss army knife.

The result? No nits. No adult lice. In fact, nothing at all that couldn’t be cured with a little Head & Shoulders.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 27 January 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com