Parasitology

According to kids' dad, our unwanted arthropod pets- head lice- are back, and chemicals were applied to the one more heavily infested contact. Everyone else in the two houses is on the Bugbusting program, to comb out the nymphs before they can plant their nit-bombs. Dodo's collar-length hair isn't so difficult to nit-comb, but Nini's tresses reach right down her back, making it torture for all concerned no matter how much conditioner is slathered. Heather's been through my hair and declared me clear, but all contacts I've informed have, like me, started itching at the news.

They're doughty, resilient little blighters those lice, and endemic in schools such that there's a note home every month or two that lice have broken out in class. There'll be another one going out next week when I alert them of this infestation.



Headlice are not to my knowledge a common vector of microbial disease, thankfully, as so frequently found in arthropods- fleas (plague), biting flies (malaria, yellow fever), ticks (Lyme disease, assorted encephalopathies) or body lice (typhus). Don't get too complacent though, because some sources say head lice can also spread typhus.

One has to question how and why headlice parasites aren't exploiting such a successful, enduring host, and whether this is likely to persist, biologically, as an unexploited niche. If human headlice are cladistically recent offshoots of body lice, as some evidence suggests, it's just a matter a time till some enterprising, capitalist, disease-causing unicellular organism hitches a free ride. Parasites, I understand, comprise about one third of all organisms. That's a successful line of work, biologically.

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."