Five Towns tackles an outbreak of lice

There is a “huge outbreak” of lice in the Five Towns and Far Rockaway, a local pediatrician told The Jewish Star this week. “It’s the whole area, it’s the entire neighborhood.”

The outbreak can be traced to the final days of the school year, when lice were detected in an undetermined number of children at one or more local schools — and parents were not notified — said the Lawrence pediatrician, Dr. Deborah Dienstag.

“They were quiet about it,” added, Shulamis Bloom, a skilled lice-checker in Far Rockaway. “I’ve never seen what happened this summer.”

“By the time we got to camp, it was all over the place,” said Dienstag.

Bloom reported ten girls in one bunk with lice, cases of lice in a boys’ camp, “siblings who went to sleep away camp had it,” another day camp sent home six children, and three backyard camps reported lice. One camp with only 20 campers had five cases, she said.

“To me that’s an epidemic,” she stated emphatically.

“Lice is not usually a major health issue but is a big concern,” Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt, Chief Administrative Officer at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, told The Star. “Screening kids and early treatment is important.”

“It crosses all zip codes and socioeconomic borders,” Dienstag said.

“It’s not because you are dirty — you catch it from somebody else,” the lice-checker said. “You are only doing a favor if you tell them [friends, neighbors] they were exposed; if someone told we wouldn’t have had this. Tell your carpool, your bunkmates. It is not something that you have to feel dirty about.”

Bloom said her primary concern now is the embarrassment of children being turned away on the first day of school.

“I’ve seen it too many times,” she said. “A girl will go to school on her first day in her uniform and very excited and even though many schools check on the day before school starts, the children are sent home the first day of school or cannot be in school the first day. My recommendation is, when they come home from camp, check through your kids’ hair to make sure they are clean, before the official checking. You have got to get rid of the lice.”

“We don’t know what’s coming home from overnight camp,” she said. “They should be checked before the first day of school.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pediculus humanus capitis (head lice) is found worldwide; in the United States, infestation is most often found in pre-school and elementary school children and their families. It is not a reportable disease, but there are estimates of 6 to 12 million cases yearly in that age group.

Head lice are very small wingless insects that inhabit the head and sometimes the eyebrows and eyelashes, feeding on human blood a few times a day. They need the blood and the warmth of the scalp to survive. They crawl and can’t hop or fly and are usually spread by head contact with an infected person and rarely from contact with hats and hair care items of an infected person.

While parents may want to try an over-the-counter method, they should “make sure to pick [the lice] out — do whatever it takes to pick them out,” Dienstag said.

She said that Israeli lice are resistant to all chemicals — “they are unkillable” — and it is “inadequate to try to use chemicals — you need to use mechanical methods, you need to remove the nits.”

“My take-home message — as soon as any camp is infested they should call all the camps and before school starts every school should be checking the kids,” Dienstag said. “Finger-pointing is irrelevant, [but] unless all the camps and schools coordinate we can’t win.”

“It should be a coordinated community effort to clean it up,” she said. “We have to face it and deal with it. It is beatable.”

To find someone to help check for lice, Dienstag suggested calling a local day camp or school for a recommendation. Both Dienstag and the lice-checker said to wash and dry the linens and towels, throw out brushes, clips, and ponytail holders. Dienstag said that preemptively, “every kid needs their own brush, comb, hair things in a separate place to keep them, in a closed plastic shoe box and labeled” — a brush shouldn’t be left on the counter for everyone to use in the morning.

Some lice-killing home remedies include soaking the hair with rosemary oil, or keeping the hair in mayonnaise or margarine overnight — it suffocates the lice, explained Dienstag. “Unless the child is very badly infested you are unlikely to see bugs.”

“If your child is scratching her head, don’t ignore it, take a look,” she stressed.

“If you see it and you are not sure, get the child checked by someone who knows what it looks like,” said Dienstag. “The worst thing is to close your eyes and hope it will go away. It won’t.

“A lot of women in the community are lice checkers — call your school; they have a relationship with women who are good at it and know what they are doing. You can do it yourself once you know what you are looking for or if there is no time you can get someone to do it.”

Bloom said that schools typically check for lice at the beginning of the year, after Succos, after the mid-winter break and after Pesach, noting that many travel to or from Israel at these junctures.

About lice:

The child’s head should be examined, concentrating on the areas behind the ears and at the back of the neck. For more information go to: cdc.gov/parasites/lice