It’s ok to not want school children infested with head lice.

Head lice are known to be easily transmissible, can cause problems especially if left untreated, and the CDC recommends that students with head lice be treated before returning to school.

I’m not going to listen to a PR piece in the media that misrepresents CDC information, to assert I guess that it’s fine to have kids in school infested with head lice — parasites that according to the ECDC, “can be involved in mechanical transmission of opportunistic bacteria”. (So here we are again, another opportunity for throwing the vulnerable under the lice bus.)

The article claims, without any evidence, that “the CDC and other organizations argue” that “The burden of missing school days due to nits far outweighs the minimal risk of transmission.” They put this in a list of bullet points that look like they’re quoted from, or at least paraphrased from, a similar bullet point list on the CDC website, except the CDC never asserted that there is “minimal risk of transmission” in that list, nor that anyone was missing school, or would miss school, because of nits. Because everyone knows head lice are extremely transmissible! And nits are not really transmissible because “nits” are often simply EMPTY SHELLS that the actual head lice had already hatched from. And the CDC’s bullet list says that. It’s talking about nits, but this article seems to have used these separate aspects of it to confuse the issue, and sort of innuendo the frame that head lice aren’t very transmissible.

On the article website, I submitted a correction to say I could not find that bullet point that appeared to be quoted, and the article author Stephanie Thompson replied to say: “This link is included in the story. The bullet points are pulled from the section under the heading “Head lice information for schools.” But this isn’t really accurate because to be accurate Thompson would’ve needed to say the statements were “pulled and reworked to make them not in agreement” because that’s the reality. There’s no mention of “minimal risk of transmission” being a factor in a cost benefit analysis on school days missed, just the assertion that having head lice is not as big a deal. Nobody is missing school because of the nits, and nobody has ever asserted that anyone’s missing school because of nits. It’s the head lice that are the problem, and still are.

The CDC of course claims that head lice don’t pose a high risk, which is different than saying there’s low transmissibility. The CDC downplays lice of course, like it downplays everything, because the CDC is about public messaging and perception — and they are run by people from a class that thinks the first priority is stopping the general public from panicking — even though there’s no evidence that ever happens. This phenomenon is known as “elite panic” — that people in charge tend to panic around the wrong things in a crisis and worry more about perceptions and controlling the public than solving the problem. So of course they’re more concerned with reassuring people that everything bad is ok actually, just for the sake of promoting calm. Here in Scranton Pennsylvania mosquitos with West Nile Virus have been found and a local official quoted in the news seemed more concerned about the public panicking over seeing mosquito traps than educating the public about what can be done about mosquitos. And West Nile Virus is actually a considerable threat, it hospitalized Dr. Anthony Fauci and he called his bout with West Nile Virus the worst sickness he’s ever had. But of course nobody’s “panicking” anyway and that’s not what officials ought to be concerned with.

The CDC does include a head lice in schools cost benefit analysis opinion from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) who the CDC says advocates that “Unnecessary days off cause a burden to the students, families, and communities, and far outweighs the risks associated with head lice.” Again it doesn’t say the risk of transmission is low, so if you don’t want your kids to get lice, this isn’t reassuring. And I think it should be a community and parental assessment of the risks versus the benefits.

I also take issue with the CDC’s statement that: “Head lice do not transmit any disease and therefore are not considered a health hazard.” Lots of things that don’t transmit infectious disease are health hazards. Cigarettes, asbestos, etc. The CDC says on the infopage about head lice that they can cause “irritability and sleeplessness” and “Sores on the head caused by scratching, which can sometimes become infected.” The CDC’s own website has a section in “healthy schools” about sleep and health, that directly refutes the claim that this isn’t a health hazard by saying “Children and adolescents who do not get enough sleep have a higher risk for many health problems…” Sleep deprivation is a known health hazard in itself, according to the CDC. So you can’t have it both ways. The CDC head lice page should at the very least stipulate that it’s not a serious health hazard, if the head lice are promptly and appropriately eliminated. If there’s a head lice outbreak at the school you can’t just let it rip, and there’s no natural herd immunity by constant re-infestation by head lice. But to their credit the CDC’s guidance does say that the student be treated for head lice before returning to school, that hasn’t changed. The CDC even added a note on their head lice page after the media article published, pointing out that their guidance has not actually changed, as the media article asserts very boldly. It’s been the guidance and continues to be that the kid goes home at the end of the day and needs to get treated before returning. A previous copy of the page on The Internet Archive from the day the article was published didn’t include that note, so it’s pretty obvious the CDC was deliberately refuting the claim that the guidance had changed from that article. I looked at earlier versions of the CDC page on “Providing Care” on The Internet Archive, and the CDC is telling the truth, it was there in June.

And most importantly, any suggestion that children don’t need to be treated for head lice or that they’re not easily transmissible, or that the CDC is suggesting those ideas, is false.

But the news article seems to be part of the larger pandemic era PR campaigns to prioritize in-person school above all else, including child safety and the prevention of transmissible afflictions. This was pushed from early on in the pandemic by the Mercatus Center funded Emily Oster, which received money from Peter Thiel, and who promoted an end to remote schooling — possibly partly out of personal motivated reasoning. But Mercatus Center has been described as “a locus of Koch-funded activity” and we know that Koch industries was very motivated to stop any covid mitigation. In the past Emily Oster wrote a book that pooh-poohed the precautionary principle for pregnant mothers and said that drinking alcohol during pregnancy was ok, but the WHO, the NHS, and the CDC definitely do not recommend that.

There’s just no end to the bullshit asymmetry principle at work in service to industry PR. Industry sees no point to stopping parasites, viruses, infections, or infestations because only the mitigations and treatments disrupt business. What it comes down to is that we all know it’s always really about keeping kids at their desks in schools, no matter what — even if there’s a report of a bomb or a school shooter, because the most important thing to industry interests is that school is daycare for working parents.