“Lice, and fungi including ringworm are becoming more challenging to treat. “The scary thing about head lice and scabies is that the agents we use to treat them are not as effective as they once were,” said Bernard Cohen, head of dermatology at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. “So there’s still research going on.”
On the skeptical side: Washington pediatrician Howard Bennett cautions that it is difficult to know how much any outbreak of, say, lice is the result of resistance to treatment or just a normal recurrence. It’s also possible, said Cohen, that the bugs have been misdiagnosed as lice. He has devised a method for determining if a particularly bothersome itch is caused by a bug, a hypersensitivity to a bug bite or just a rash.
In Washington, the lice problem has become severe enough that some people are earning a living as professional ‘nitpickers’ for parents who can’t (or don’t want to) deal with the nitty gritty of getting the nits out of the family’s hair. “It isn’t about being clean or dirty,” said Karen Franco, who picks lice nits out of hair professionally. She has an office in Kensington. “It has actually become a rich-man’s problem. Our kids have so many extracurricular activities from ballet to gymnastics. There is so much cross-population.”
Super Lice and Scabies Frustrate Parents
ATLANTA – Atlanta mother Randy Foster had done all the typical things to get rid of head lice in her daughter’s hair. She bought the chemical cream rinses, vacuumed the carpets, bagged the toys, and picked out the eggs, known as nits, with a metal comb. None of it worked.
“Nobody warned me about how hard it was going to be to get rid of them, ” Foster said. “No one told us how this was going to turn our lives upside down.”
Foster said she believes her daughter Chelsea, may have been infested with lice that has developed resistance to typical chemical treatments – a trend that may afflict scores of families and schools, experts say. Although scientists are unable to say how widespread the problem of “super lice” may be, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta acknowledge that they are seeing significant anecodal evidence of tougher bugs.
“We’re seeing alot of frustrated parents, lots of frustrated physicans and lots of frustrated school nurses,” said Sue Partridge, spokesperson for the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases.
The questions We should all be asking is:
Whether the harder to treat version of these body bugs and parasites are simply adapting to the chemicals used on them for the last few decades, or if the bugs and worms themselves have been modified. Dr. Hildegarde Staninger has reported that her research has found scabies that are absolutely genetically modified to be “super scabies” delivery systems.
