For school nurses, head lice can be a never-ending problem

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- When asked about head lice, school nurse Paula Barlow laughs in a way that sounds a little like a groan.

"You know that's our favorite subject, don't you?" said Barlow, who has been the nurse at Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., for 12 years and has been named School Nurse of the Year for the 2009-10 school year by the Georgia Association of School Nurses.

"When people think about school nurses, they automatically think head lice," Barlow continued. "Like we spend all day picking nits out of students' hair."

It's a stereotype, but it does contain a grain of truth. Barlow said that head lice are a daily, never-ending problem for school nurses.

Big, school-wide infestations are rare. Barlow said she hasn't seen a major outbreak of head lice once in her time at Kingsland.

But there are some kids -- families, even -- for whom head lice are a constant problem.

"It's an everyday occurrence for some students," Barlow said. "We'll see the same kids and the same families time after time. You clean them up, and they come back next month."

The kids with head lice get referred to Barlow by their teacher, who will see them scratching and send them to the school nurse. There used to be class checks for head lice performed by teachers, but those have generally fallen by the wayside.

"When you do a check and Tommy and Susie have to go home, the other kids know they had head lice," she said. "It's a social stigma, when you send kids home and the other kids know why."

Barlow works with the parents, urging them to get medication and treat their children. But sometimes the same kids just keep coming back. Their parents don't seem to be able to figure out how to get rid of the pests.

For those kids, the goal becomes keeping them in school while making sure there isn't an outbreak of head lice.

"If we have a child and we know they've been treated and we don't see any live bugs, we'll let them stay in class," Barlow said. "We let these kids stay in school because otherwise they would be missing so much school. They just would fall behind."

So part of Barlow's morning routine is to comb through the hair of these kids with a gadget that's basically a fine-toothed comb with an AA battery attached. When a louse hits the comb, the battery's tiny electric charge zaps them dead.

"I have gotten bugs out of children's heads that are about the size of a period with that comb," she said. "They will come in before class and I will [comb] them and then send them on to class pretty confident there's no live bugs in their hair."

Barlow said she's never gotten head lice from her work. Head lice crawl around and can't hop or fly so they don't move from person-to-person very well. If they fall off the body, they die quickly.

"You do see it a lot in the spring, when kids are playing sports, like softball, and sharing caps," she said. "You mainly see it in kids who spend the night together and sleep in the same bed. But it's very much an individual problem, and we work with the families individually."

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