Lice more nuisance than health risk

Ironwood Daily Globe
By JASON JUNO and DIANE MONTZ
Globe Staff Writers
October 21, 2007

Feeling itchy? If you don't, keep reading.

Head lice can annoy and make you scratch, scratch and scratch some more. They can be a factor in closing a school down. But the small parasites can't directly hurt people, according to the Mayo Clinic Web site.

Bessemer Schools closed its doors Friday to clean up A.D. Johnston High School. It could have stayed open, but school officials wanted to put an end to what could have been a lingering problem.

It doesn't help that ADJ has carpeting, principal Mark Johnson said. That could allow lice more places to stay.

Officials there planned to clean the entire high school and open the school back up Monday.

Lice will die within two days if they have no blood to feed on, the clinic site said.

The only risk is from scratching too much and creating abrasions, which could become infected, the Mayo Clinic site says.

Still, most people feel nothing. If they do, it's mainly an itch that grabs your focus.

There are special shampoos to get it out of hair. But the problem comes at home and in school. Everything from clothing to bedding to furniture needs to be cleaned to get rid of it.

Johnson said the district didn't want to put anymore families through that long task.

Head lice live off blood from an individual's scrap. Only the common cold affects more students among transmittable diseases.

The problem seems to be centered in Bessemer and Wakefield-Marenisco, this time.

Ironwood superintendent Jim Rayner said he didn't know of any head lice cases there Friday.

School officials in nearby Wisconsin districts said they had no known cases of head lice this week.

At Hurley, elementary secretary Leola Maslanka said they had some head lice at the start of the school year, but none now.

They check for lice at the start of school and after every major break, according to Maslanka.

If they have a student with lice, she said, they check the whole class as well as friends and other family members of the student at school.

"We have a no-nit policy," she said. Nits are the eggs lice hatch from. Students sent home for head lice must be checked by the Iron County health department before they return to school.

Mercer K-12 School principal Jody Bognar said she did not know of any head lice cases in the school at this time.

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