September 16, 2025 • 39 mins
For a tiny insect, lice sure can cause big problems! Today Mango and producer Mary—both veterans of the head lice wars—dive into the ancient history of this itchy critter (including mummies with lice!), explore bizarre superstitions and home remedies you shouldn’t try (please don’t dunk your head in kerosene!), and finally, talk to some experts about treatments that do work… and why you might want to take a moment to appreciate your lice before you destroy them.
- Check out Dale Clayton’s Clayton & Bush Lab at the University of Utah.
- Learn more about Dale’s AirAlle device.
- Watch Laurie Moyer’s videos on YouTube and TikTok, or visit Lice Centers of Wisconsin.
- Learn more about Ian Burgess’s work at Insect Research & Development.
Got a question you’d like us to answer? A rabbit hole you think we should explore? Email higeniuses@gmail.com or leave us a message at (302) 405-5925.
Follow us on Instagram @parttimegenius and Bluesky @parttimegenius.bsky.social!
“Hunting for Lice” (1652) by Gerard ter Borch, via Wikimedia Commons.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Guess what, Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
What's that Mary?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The oldest known sentence written in an alphabet is about lice.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
One. I don't know how that is possible, and to
just saying the words lice is already making the itch.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
This is completely true. The sentence in question was written
in Canaanite, which was the world's first letter based writing system.
It began around five thousand years ago, and roughly translated,
the sentence says, quote, may this tusk root out the
lice of the hair and the beard. Archaeologists discovered these
historic words inscribed on an ivory lyce comb that was
(00:59):
estimated to be about three thousand, seven hundred years old.
And if this com wasn't, you know, like a priceless artifact,
you could still use it to delouse yourself. One side
has wide teeth to detangle knots in your hair, and
the other side has fine teeth designed to catch lice
and knits, which of course are laus eggs.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
You know, I'm just imagining some parent almost four thousand
years ago, grabbing this comb in a panic because their
kid came home from school with lice, which honestly feels
too relatable.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, no, it really does well, and that's because like
it or not, lice have always been with us, and
today head lice are incredibly common. It is estimated that
as many as one in four school children have them
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And since it's back to school time right now in
the Northeast, I've bet some of our listeners are dealing
with this problem. So the good news is today on
this show, we'll meet some scientists and some experts who've
dedicated their lives to understanding these creepy crawleys and also
finding ways to get them out of our hair. And
of course we'll also discover some truly surprising facts about lice,
(02:04):
including how they helped solve a long standing mystery about
human evolution, and also why you can't ground them. And
if you are someone in your household currently has lice,
do not worry. We'll get into the science of what
you should do and what you should do to deal
with them. So let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners,
(02:46):
welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Monga's Shatiicular and today
I'm joined by my producer, Mary Super producer Mary, I
should say, and over there on the other side of
the soundproof glass drinking a big glass of whey and vinegar.
It is our pal and producer, Dylan Fagan.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I don't mean to yuck Dylan's yell.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Oh you should, but yuck, that's so gross.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
The concoction does not sound appealing at all, but according
to a book of medical remedies written around sixteen hundred,
it is a sure fire away to kill lice, and
it's a lot simpler than another remedy that the same
book suggests, taking powdered scrapings from the horn of a
red deer, drinking some of it and sprinkling the rest
(03:29):
on your head. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I feel like these things would just give you a
stomach ache, although maybe that would distract you from being
itchy at least, was that the idea.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Maybe. What is interesting, though, is that even now in
twenty twenty five, there are still a lot of weird,
unproven home remedies floating around on the Internet. I found
posts telling people to wrap their heads in duct tape
or rub hot sauce on their hair, which I do
not think is a good idea. There's also an old
myth that kerosene kills lice, and that one's not just weird,
(04:00):
it's also dangerous. There have been multiple cases of people
suffering severe burns after applying kerosene and then getting too
close to a pilot light or a cigarette. I mean,
it's awful.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh God, that is awful. Look, I understand the impulse
because if you or your kids have lice, you will
try anything to get rid of them. And I should
know because I have had lice three times as an adult.
I'll say it here for everyone listening. I managed to
avoid it my entire childhood, but I have a school
age child of my own now, and I guess we
(04:30):
could say my luck ran out. Our first experience with
lice was two years ago and it was completely miserable.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, I can commiserate it, because you're definitely not alone.
I also have school age children, and my families had
lice so many times now. It is the worst and
also something I just don't understand, because, like you, it's
something I never got as a kid.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well, you know, as it happens. I know all about
that because on the show, we do research. We talked
to experts, that's what we do. So I took the
already of calling up the real expert on your family's
lice situation. I am referring to our friend of the show,
occasional writer for the show, your wife, Lizzie.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
I don't like this at all.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Tell me about the first time you guys had lace.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
What happened the first time is what has happened every
single time since then, which is that all three of
us get at ruby, Henry and me and Monkish does
every single time.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Do you resent Mangush for not getting lace one hundred percent?
Speaker 5 (05:32):
And he has like he'll do these theories about, oh,
it's the kind of hair I have, And I'm like, no,
because our children share, you know, some of your hair qualities.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
It's just that they they rub up all over me
and they just do that to Mungash in the same way.
So it's like, that's kind of all it is.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Oh man, I just remember one of those times, I
was like, Henry, were you close to anyone's head or
do you know anyone who was itching? And he didn't
think of anyone when I asked him, you know, he
was like four or five at the time. And then
later he was telling me about this game he knew
friends played where and part of the game involved pressing
your forehead against another kid's forehead to share thoughts and
(06:12):
then run away. And it was so horrified. It was like,
I asked you both these things specifically, and you were
playing a game that.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Basically you said ahead. You didn't say fourhead.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's true, but I mean he basically could have built
a bridge from his head to his friend's head. It's
just to like encourage the lights to walk over. But
I remember a nurse examining our hair in our classrooms
as a kid and telling us that certain hair was
more resistant to lice. And I'm sure that's what I
said to Lizzie at some point when she was just
(06:42):
exasperated with me.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Well, I mean, that would be nice, But scientifically speaking,
there's not a lot of evidence for that. What we
know is that anyone with hair can get lce, and
direct physical contact head to head or forehead to forehead
in your kid's case, is what makes it happen. Data
from schools have found really or social patterns of life's transmission.
So for example, a kid with lice might not spread
(07:05):
it to the kid who sits right next to them
in class, but they do spread it to their best
friend who sits on the other side of the room,
because at recess those kids are closer. Maybe they're hugging
or leaning their heads together to talk or transmit ideas telepathically.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Right, Yeah, that makes sense. But are you saying everyone's
risk of getting lice is the same if head to
head contact is equal.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Not necessarily. It's possible lice may have a harder time
gripping hair shafts that are naturally kinky or curly, and
there have been some studies that have found lower rates
of infestation among Black Americans compared to Americans of other ethnicities,
but that could also be related to different grooming practices,
different hair care products. On the flip side, there's some
(07:50):
data and anecdotal report suggesting that there are people who
are super spreaders of lice, that is, they have lice more.
But whether that means they're more likely to get them
or to have a harder time getting rid of them,
we just don't know either way. The bottom line is,
if you learn nothing else from this show, it is
that no one is totally immune to lie. If you
(08:10):
have hair, you can have lice.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Got it, So no more bragging about my miraculous lice immunity.
That's a mosquitoes love me so like, it's not all bugs,
it's just lice that seemed to have woin me. But
it's interesting that there are all these unanswered questions about
who might be at greater risk for lice, Like, is
that a big area of research right now?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, there certainly are scientists who are really interested in
this stuff, But the fact is, head lice are not
a big priority for research funding. They're considered an annoyance,
not a real medical problem, which I totally understand. But
the first time you find a lous in your kid's hair,
it sure feels like a real problem.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I know. Before we go any further, I think we
should clarify that for most of this episode we are
talking about human head lice. There are actually three types
of human lice, pubic lice or crab lice. Those are
distantly related to head lice and body lice. They're kind
of their own thing. And then body lice are very
closely related to head lice, but they took a fascinating
(09:11):
evolutionary detour that's made them different in a few critical ways.
Body lice feed on our blood, just like head lice do.
But they figured out how to live and lay their
eggs in our clothing instead of our skin or our hair,
and that actually helped solve a long standing mystery about
human evolution, the question of when people began wearing clothes.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I never thought about that question before, but now I
want to know the answer.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Well, for a long time, the best estimate we had
was that it happened sometime between forty thousand and three
million years ago, so there's a huge gap in there.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's not really a satisfying answer.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It doesn't really answer the question. But the problem is
early clothing was handmade from animal hide stuff that decayed easily,
so there's really no record for modern scientists to study. Then,
in twenty ten, came up with a much more specific
time frame for the advent of clothing, and they did
this by analyzing DNA sequences of body lice and head lice.
(10:09):
They were able to determine that body lice emerged as
a distinct ecotype of head lice at least eighty three
thousand years ago, and possibly as early as one hundred
and seventy thousand years ago, which means that's the period
when humans began wearing clothing, because otherwise there would have
been no evolutionary incentive for lice to change. And it
turns out we have a lot more to learn from
(10:29):
ancient lice. I can sum it up in a single word, archaeoparasitology.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
That feels like it should be multiple words. That's one word.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
I know it's too long to be three scrapple bingos,
but it is exactly what it sounds like. It's the
study of parasites in the context of archaeology, So that
means looking at how parasites affected ancient people and even
studying evidence of parasites in mummies. Now, thanks to this discipline,
we know that lice were widespread in prehistoric times. The
(11:00):
oldest direct record of lice infestation is a ten thousand
year old intact louse egg that was found in a
Brazilian mummy's hair.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Wow, so that's thousands of years before the inscribed louse
comb I told you about at the top, and even
more thousands of years before Dylan's vinegar and waite concoction.
So what did people do back then to get rid
of lice? Do we know?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah? In prehistoric times, one of the most common ways
of dealing with lice was to simply pick them out
of people's hair and eat them. And we know that
happened because adult lice have been found in copper lights,
which is of course fossilized extrement, which is gross. Yeah,
but it's also kind of wonderful, right, Like, the historic
record is written in places where a lot of us
(11:42):
would never really think to look. So I'm grateful for
the people who dig through it, literally, and I'm also
grateful that I don't have to eat my kid's lice.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, we've come a long way. We've come a long way. Well,
speaking of which, I want to fast forward from prehistoric
to medieval times because during the Middle Ages, people developed
some pretty wacky theories about where lice and other parasites
come from. They didn't understand how transmission happened, so they
concluded that lice were the result of spontaneous generation. In
(12:13):
other words, they believed lice originated in so called corrupt
matter like dirt and bodily fluids, which is how he
got the idea that having lice is a sign of
bad hygiene, an idea that's kind of still around today,
even though we know it's really not true. But there
was another way of looking at lice. Back then, some
people viewed lice infestation as proof of humility and moral goodness, so.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
They actually thought that lice were a good thing.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, because holy men and women often gave up grooming
along with other worldly concerns, so if they got lice,
instead of removing them, they would just ignore them, which
of course meant they spread. There was actually this bishop
named Thomas Decantelope, that was his name, who was canonized
in thirteen twenty, and during that process some of his
servants testify on his behalf that he was always covered
(13:02):
in lice, and this was meant to prove that he
was a true man of God who didn't allow himself
to be distracted by frivolous things like combing his hair.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
That sounds absolutely miserable.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
That was the point. But just how miserable Bishop to
Cantelope was would depend on his immune system, because the
itching we experience when we have lice is an allergic
reaction to the lous bites, and some people have milder
reactions than others. In fact, some people don't really itch
at all, which of course makes it easier for them
to spread lice because they are not immediately aware that
(13:35):
they have them.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I mean, I think my son ished his head a lot,
but Ruby didn't really, And I mean I remember thinking like,
how can there be so many lice? Heer in not
scratching harder.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
My kid was the same way. I was so itchy.
I couldn't sleep when I had lice because I was
itching so badly. Meanwhile, my kid is just walking around
and he actually did have more lice than I did
in the final tally. But I just must be more
sensitive to the bites, you know, like some people get
itchier with a mosquito bite than other people. It's just
your immune system.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Well, I was definitely scratching a lot, just knowing that
my kids had lice and I didn't have any. But
the good news is there are ways to deal with
lice that don't involve vinegar, kerosene or becoming a saint.
And after this quick break, we're going to hear from
a scientist. He invented something called the lausbuster, and we'll
learn how a common skincare product makes lice explode. So
(14:32):
don't go anywhere. Welcome back to a very itchy episode
of Part Time genius. I know this is a weird
thing to say when we're talking about lice, but if
(14:54):
you enjoy what you're hearing, please leave us a nice
rating and review and share this episode with a friend.
If you know anyone who's a parent of school age kids,
I guarantee they'll want to hear this part at least. Okay, Mary,
So here's something I learned about back when my kids
first Got Life, and that is the fact that a
lot of the over the counter a chemical products just
don't work. In fact, my friend Nick, who grew up
(15:18):
closer to my age, he said that he used to
Get Life so much that his friends used to call
him Nix because there was a product called Nicks.
Speaker 6 (15:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's still on the lind Yeah. But I
looked into it and it turns out that lies have
developed resistance to the insecticides that were used for years
to treat people like Nick. And this is just a
natural thing that happens. And we see this with other
bugs too. For example, farmers often have to come up
with solutions when pests develop resistance to common ag pesticides.
(15:49):
Another analogy, and one that's really serious, is antibiotic resistance,
right you hear about this all the time, But these
examples all follow the same evolutionary principle. Some bo are
able to survive exposure to chemicals or drugs, and they
pass that hardiness onto their offspring, and over time those
traits just get stronger and stronger. The resistance spreads through
(16:11):
the population and it's awful for us.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, yeah, no, I've heard about this. In the case
of antibiotic resistance, I know it can have really serious
public health consequences.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah. So, Luckily, headlights are different in that they don't
carry disease. So even if your drug store shampoo doesn't work,
having headlights won't make you sick. It just really makes
you itchy. Now, body lies are a different story. Remember
we talked about how they evolve the ability to live
in our clothes instead of our hair. Well, somewhere along
the way they also managed to become disease vectors. So,
(16:42):
during World War One, a disease called trench fever affected thousands,
maybe even millions, of troops, and doctors discovered later that
it was caused by a bacteria carried by the common
body loss, which flourished in the crowded conditions of trench
warfare now. Dale Clayton at the University of Utah is
an evolutionary biologist and life expert, and he told us
(17:03):
that this tiny but important difference is something he spends
a lot of time thinking about.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
One of the most pressing questions about human life is
why do we have life that vector nasty things, that
live primarily in clothing but still take blood males from
humans and life that are technically the same species that
live on the heads of one out of four school
(17:29):
kids all across the country, and one is dangerous and
the other is basically harmless. And how long will it
take before head life evolves the ability to vector nasty things?
Will that ever happen? It could happen in ten years
or a million years, We don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Okay, First of all, I realize it is the scientific
term for what lifess do, but taking blood meals from
humans sounds like the tigeline for a horror movie. I'm
to have chills just thinking about this. But and second,
this is actually terrifying. Is he saying that headlights could
evolve the ability to make us sick?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah? I mean it is possible. There's no indication it's happening, right, now,
but this is the kind of thing evolutionary biologists have
to consider, which is why it's in our best interest
to have a really effective way of treating headlince. But
to back up for a second, Dale actually does most
of his work with feather lice that live on birds.
Unlike human headlights, they don't take blood meals. They eat feathers,
(18:31):
which is pretty wild to think about, and he's been
working with feather lice for decades. In fact, when he
was a grad student, he named a new species of
owl feather laughs, after the cartoonist Gary Larson, who was
so excited that he drew a picture of it and
published it in his nineteen eighty nine book The Prehistory
of the Far Side.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I wasn't sure where that was going, but that is
not where I thought we would end up. I do
love it, though. What a strange honor to have a
laus named after you.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
It's kind of wonderful, it really is.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
So.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
As a veteran life expert, of course, Dale knew about
human headlights developing resistance to insecticides, but he wasn't focused
on finding a treatment for them until his own kids
got lice and he realized he didn't know what to do.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
My wife was kind of angry because she says, you're
all the world authorities on lice and you don't even
know how to get rid of lice on our kids.
What's going on? So that was a motivator.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I should note here that he's referring to his first wife.
This is actually relevant to this discussion because his second
wife also studies lie. They've even named species of lice
after their kids.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
The dinner table conversations at the Clayton household must be fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I think they probably are. Anyway, Dale's pondering his kids
head lice, and then he remembers a weird problem he
had back when he first moved to Utah. And this
was after teaching in the Midwest and the UK.
Speaker 6 (19:51):
I discovered, to my dismay, I couldn't keep lice alive
on pigeons here, and it took about a year to
figure out that the reason is it's too arid.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So what's interesting is that lice can't live in tanks
or petri dishes. They can only survive on a living host.
So when Dale was setting up his lab at the
University of Utah, he got a bunch of pigeons so
you could study their feather lice. And the pigeons were fine.
The feather lice were not. Since they aren't blood sucking lice.
They rely on moisture from the air for hydration, and
(20:23):
the air in Utah is really dry, so the only
way to keep his lab lice alive was to modify
the ambient humidity. So when drug store shampoos failed his
own kids, it occurred to him that maybe dry air
could be the key to killing headlights that are resistant
to all the chemical treatment.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
And so we started tankeering with different approaches. The University
of Utah is one of the best universities in the
country for entrepreneurial work. There's money for researchers to try
weird things, get like pre med students involved in those projects,
and so we started pursuing this possibility of using heated air,
(21:03):
and after a while we figured out how to make
it work, and then we got bigger dings to develop
an actual medical device.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Dale and his team called their invention the Lousebuster. The
name has since been changed to air Alay because of
a trademark issue, but the way it works is it
blows heated air through a hose that's attached to an
applicator that you comb slowly through your hair.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So like a very precise hair dryer.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Kind of, but instead of blowing air over the hair,
it's actually getting down to the surface of your head
where the lice are. And more importantly, it's getting to
the eggs, which lice glue to hair shafts right next
to the scalp. And the temperature is carefully calibrated to
dry out the lice without burning your skin. In the
test he did with local kids living in Salt Lake City,
Dale found that his device killed live lice and it
(21:54):
prevented the eggs from hatching. It took over a year
to dial in the right temperatures and tree in juration,
but it finally became this viable medical device.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So wait, is this something I can just go buy
and keep at home in case we ever get lice again?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
You know, I had the same thought, But it would
actually be pretty expensive as a consumer device, and you
do need to be trained to use it correctly. But
Dale licensed the Airla device to this network called Lyfe's
Clinics of America. This is not an AD, but they
have locations around the country and people with lice can
make an appointment to go in for treatment.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Wow, I wish I had known about that when we
had lice, well like you and Lizzie and Dale Clayton
and millions of other people who have dealt with head lice.
The first thing I tried was a drug store shampoo
and a little plastic comb that came with it. Both
of these things were completely useless. Luckily, I do nitpicky
research for a living, so I dove into the literature
(22:47):
on lice and emerged with an idea one hundred percent
food grade dimethicone.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Wait, so what it is is?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
So it's a type of silicone that's often used in
cosmetics as a skin protectant. Does is It forms a
protective barrier that locks in moisture, and it really doesn't
have a lot of downsides. It's not toxic, it's not flammable,
it's totally inert. It can even be an ingredient in
cooking oils. You can actually consume it. So the way
I got rid of our life was by coating my
(23:16):
head and my kid's head in a generous, sticky pore
of dimethicone, let it sit for a while, did a
thorough combing and then washed it out. That was actually
the hardest part because it is so thick, so slippery
and water resistant. It took like four rounds of washing
to get out.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
It sounds like an oil slickers. Yeah, how does this
stuff kill lice? Like, if it's non toxic, does it
suffocate them? Or what's happening?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Well, that's what I assumed was happening, that they were
drowning or suffocating. But I wasn't sure, so I called
up Ian Burgess, a world renowned scientist and the director
of a company called Insect Research and Development that investigates
ways of controlling insects that impact public health, like lice.
But before we get to the science, you should know
that Ian has an interesting perspective on lace.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
When I was a master's student, I opted to work
on crab or cubic lice because I felt sorry for
them because nobody had actually done any work on them
really for about forty five fifty years before that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
You felt sorry for the pubic lace?
Speaker 7 (24:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (24:25):
And if you've been ignored scientifically, surely they werenant some sympathy.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I don't know if I quite share his perspective, but
I guess I do understand whying to study the things
that everyone else overlooks.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, exactly, And when it comes to lice, a lot
of people overlook them. Not Ian, though, So I asked
him when I poured dimethicone on my head, did I
suffocate the lice?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
It's almost impossible to suffocate a loss. You can put
them in an environment without breath of oxygen for quite
a long time. I've had lices that have been immersed
in water for twelve hours, so clearly they can't breathe.
You can take them out and dry them off, warm
them up, and pack their backside so they will walk away.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Wait, that is unbelievable. Underwater for twelve hours and they
are totally fine. How do lies do that?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, to drastically oversimplify it, they enter something like a
power saving mode. But it just goes to show you
that head lies are really not easy to kill. And
to explain why damethicone does kill them, I have to
tell you a little bit about laus anatomy. So human
headlights feed on blood, which is mostly water. For most creatures,
(25:42):
consuming liquid eventually leads to urination, but head lice only
produce dry feces. And Ian told me that's because peeing
on our heads would alert us to their presence a
lot faster.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Right, That is not a sense I was expecting you
to say this episode.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
We're full of surprise today. Okay, So they can't pee, right,
The lyuse can't pee, but they still need to get
rid of liquid waste, so they do it through a
process called spiracular transpiration. Now, spiracles are tiny respiratory openings
on the louse's exoskeleton that lead to the trachea or
the airway, and they help maintain this very precise equilibrium
(26:21):
where excess water in the louse's body goes into the
trachea and then out through the spiracles. What the dmethicone
does is it coats and plugs these little openings so
nothing can get in and crucially, nothing can get out.
The louse doesn't know this. Its body is trying to
pump extra water into the trachea, but it has nowhere
(26:41):
to go, so it flows back into the gut. And
after a little while this throws off the equilibrium completely
and all that extra pressure just builds up inside.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
And if the louse had fed just before it was coated.
In fact, you can see the louse gut explode.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
I mean, it is stunning that you didn't suffocate your
lives but you blew them up instead. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Technically, yeah, there is one caveat here, and that is
Dimethicone can kill live lice, but it cannot kill knits.
It can't kill the eggs. So if you just do
one treatment, any eggs left in your hair.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Will hatch and then you'll be overwhelm with lice again.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well not right away, so it takes eggs up to
ten days to hatch, and lice can't reproduce until they
are about eleven to fourteen days old. Obviously, you have
no way of knowing the age of all the knits
in your hair. You don't have like a little louse
sensus that you can refer to. But you can kill
the newly hatched lice before they reach maturity with a
little careful planning. So here's what you do. After your
(27:46):
first dimethicone treatment, wait five days and do it again.
You'll kill anything that hatched in those days directly following
that initial application. Then you wait five more days and repeat.
That should ensure that all the eggs have hatched, but
none of the living lice are old enough to lay
eggs on their own, and of course you can use
a good comb to remove nits and lice in between
(28:06):
these applications for extra peace of mind.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I mean, I have to say, you sound like a
full time life's genius.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I wish I could take credit for all of this,
but the truth is, everything I know about this dimethicone
treatment schedule I learned from a woman in Wisconsin who
is basically the Martha Stewart of lice, and will get
to meet her after this quick break. Welcome back to
(28:43):
a lousy episode of Part Time Genius. So mangush. We've
touched on this a little bit, but I want to
get into it some more. And that is the emotional
impact of having lice. When I spoke to Lizzy, I
told her how I had an existential crisis the first
time we got lis. I just I didn't know what
to do. There was all this conflict information online. I
read one thing that said I needed to bag up
(29:04):
all my kid's toys and bedding and seal it away
for ten days. My kid was upset and embarrassed. It
just felt so overwhelming, and at some point I remember
sitting on the bathroom floor, like why, why us, Why
me why now right? I felt crazy and Lizzie was like, no, no,
you're not crazy. I get it.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
There are dangerous places my mind can definitely go to,
like how is this tiny, tiny thing alaos is tiny
and it is tinier.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
How can they like wreak so much havoc and like
take me down?
Speaker 5 (29:38):
You know, a bear is more likely to like kill me,
I guess, but this lous is still really out my life.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I mean that is so true. Oh my god. Every
time we got lies, it was such an ordeal and
it felt like, why is this happening? He was you
feel dirty, you get stripped the beds. We took all
the stuffed animals away and then spent hours in the
bathroom with little kids who did not want it's still
putting thick shampoo into their hair and trying to comb
out the eggs and it was just so miserable and
(30:07):
you think you're done and then it happens again. But
you know, eventually we got rid of them by going
to a professional lice combing service here in Brooklyn. But yeah,
it's just one more thing you have to deal with
and figure out, and for busy parents, it's just the worst.
And even though you know lice are harmless. There's such
a stigma that you don't want your kids to give
it to others. You feel like you haven't taken care
(30:27):
of your kids. It really can take a toll.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
It can, and that is where Laurie Moyer comes in.
Laurie runs a life's treatment center in Wisconsin, but she
reaches hundreds of thousands of people all around the world
through social media. She has over one hundred and twenty
seven thousand followers on TikTok, where she posts videos demystifying
lice and teaching proper combing techniques, and she's basically the
all powerful voice of reason on the Our Life's subreddit,
(30:52):
where every day anxious people post questions about how to
tell if this thing they found is allows and what
to do if it is actually Now Laurie's read it
posts about dimethicone. When I was panicking the first time
we had lice, she was just so patient and calm
and detailed in her responses. It made me feel for
the first time like maybe I could handle this. And
(31:12):
when I talked to her on the phone for this episode,
she told me that keeping people calm is a big
part of her job.
Speaker 7 (31:18):
What I see happening quite often is someone will get
a notice from their child's daycare or their child's school
that there is a case of lice, a confirmed case
of lice, and then they become panicked. It just spirals
into complete chaos, and I try to talk people, you know,
back down.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Part of that panic, Laurie says, comes from misunderstanding lice
and how they live. A lot of people think, like
you did, that having life means they have to deep
clean their whole house and throw out the clothes, vacuum
the furniture, bag up the toys. Of course, that's going
to feel daunting.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Now.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Some lives can survive for a few hours on surfaces
that aren't human heads. But here's the thing, they're not bad.
They really can't live very long without us.
Speaker 7 (32:03):
And I liken it to being a human being an
outer space. Right, if you were up in a rocket ship,
a capsule, whatever, But if you were up beyond the
Earth's atmosphere, could you potentially open that hatch and go
out into outer space? You could, sure, But why wouldn't
you because you couldn't survive there. There's no oxygen there,
(32:27):
you couldn't survive. So the same is true for headlights.
They need your head to survive, and if they were
to come off the head, it's either because they're dying
or dyed, or maybe you disturbed your hair in some
way that knocked them off the head. But they're going
to just crawl back in the hair if they can.
They certainly aren't readily walking off of a human head
to go on a squish mellow.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
I mean, I would be lying right now if I
said I wasn't picturing a tiny louse in an astronaut suit.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
I think we all are. I think we all are.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You know this might sound weird, but this episode has
kind of made me, I don't want to say fond
of lies, but I certainly respect them more than I
did before we started learning all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah, same, Ian Burgess actually had a really wonderful way
of putting this.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
These animals have lived on humans since humans began, and
their forebears before that, and throughout that time, to varying degrees,
we have tried to get rid of them, and they've
survived every one of those challenges and they're still doing
it and there are still so many things we need
(33:32):
to learn about them. If you ever looked down a
microscope at a little louse going about its business. It's
a fascinating, really actually quite beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Oh I love that. I mean, if my kids get
lies again, I'll want to get rid of them, for sure.
But now I'm kind of wondering, like, does that mean
I want to get rid of all this? I'm not
totally sure.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I'm so glad you brought that up, because I asked
Ian that exact question. What would happen or what would
change in the world if we woke up tomorrow and
all human had lives were gone?
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Nothing, as far as I know, other than the fact
that we would have had an extinction. I mean, it's
a This is a marable question, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (34:18):
It is?
Speaker 3 (34:18):
I think Yeah. It's an ethical question anyway, What apart
from our squeamishness, what right have we to decide that
life are less valuable than something else? Okay, we consider
ourselves or humans consider themselves the peak of evolution. But
(34:40):
where do you draw the line? Okay, a louse may
not be what you want, but then what about, say,
something like a worm in your gut? Parasitic worms can
often eliminate on certainly on a temporary basis for allergies.
So they have a function, and it could be that
(35:01):
lice have a function. We just haven't pinned it down yet.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
I never thought of that. But you know, we go
back to school in September, and if we get lice again,
I feel like I'll be much more emotionally prepared for it.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Love your Lice. Well, there was a school we went to.
We've done coming in schools for years, and there was
one school we went to where the kids are about
six years old. Some of the kids cried because they
didn't have lice and their friends did, and the ones
(35:37):
who had lice then had disagreements as to who had
the best lice.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Oh my god, kids are the best. That's so funny.
My life could beat up your life. My life are
faster than your life.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Sure so, in fact, all the fear and hatred and
squeamishness and things about life come from adults, not from children.
Children only feel bad about life because adults thrust this
upon them.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Okay, can we make part time genius t shirts that
say love your lice?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Absolutely not. That is too far, But you know what
we can do. We can head down to the rec
Center to sum up everything we've learned today about what
to do if you or someone in your house has lice.
(36:37):
Step one, remain calm. Headlights are a nuisance, but they
are not dangerous, and there's really nothing to be embarrassed about.
At any given moment. Millions of people have lice, so
you're definitely in good company.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Step two. Buy a good quality metal nitcomb and check
online for videos that show the right way to use it.
The comb I used and the one Laurie Morier recommends,
has a round handle and lots of long, thin teeth
with little grooves that help snag the lice and eggs.
And actually, if you have school age kids, Laurie suggests
doing regular comb throughs with the nitcomb as a preventative measure,
(37:11):
because if you catch an infestation early, it is so
much easier to treat and contain.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Step three, figure out your treatment plan. You can search
for a professional lyce clinic in your area or DIY
with dimethicone, but you don't need to throw out your
clothes or spend days deep cleaning like we did. And
it's probably not worth bothering with those drug store shampoos either.
They just don't work that well anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Step four. If you're using dimethicone at home, like I did,
be sure to follow the schedule exactly. Apply on day one,
day five, and day ten. Oh and I asked Lauri
if it's possible to do this if you have braids
or locks you don't want to take out, and she
said yes, you can apply the domethicone directly to the
scalp without undoing them, but you will need to wash
it out. Speaking of which, here is a bonus tip
(37:54):
from me. A person with long thick care, regular shampoo
did not cut through the dimethicone very well, so I
handed up U sing Don dish soap. It worked, but
it is very rough on your hair, so use plenty
of conditioner afterwards.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Well, Marry, since you've battled lized yourself and I've always
escaped unscathed, I think you deserve today's trophy.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
You know what, I'll take it. It means the suffering
was worth something.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I'm glad you have that justification. Well, that does it
for today. We will be back next week with another
new episode. In the meantime, you can send us a
message by emailing High Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's hi.
Geniuses at gmail dot com or give us a call
at three oh two, four oh five, five nine two five. Seriously,
give us a call. We love hearing your messages. Sometimes
(38:41):
we play them on the show. We love to get
more of them. Special thanks to everyone we spoke with
for this episode, and from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself.
Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(39:05):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
by Will Pearson and Me Mongish Heatikler and researched by
our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and
produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell
(39:26):
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
trustee Dara Potts and buy Me Shoring. For more podcasts
from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Guess what, Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
What's that Mary?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The oldest known sentence written in an alphabet is about lice.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
One. I don't know how that is possible, and to
just saying the words lice is already making the itch.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
This is completely true. The sentence in question was written
in Canaanite, which was the world's first letter based writing system.
It began around five thousand years ago, and roughly translated,
the sentence says, quote, may this tusk root out the
lice of the hair and the beard. Archaeologists discovered these
historic words inscribed on an ivory lyce comb that was
(00:59):
estimated to be about three thousand, seven hundred years old.
And if this com wasn't, you know, like a priceless artifact,
you could still use it to delouse yourself. One side
has wide teeth to detangle knots in your hair, and
the other side has fine teeth designed to catch lice
and knits, which of course are laus eggs.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
You know, I'm just imagining some parent almost four thousand
years ago, grabbing this comb in a panic because their
kid came home from school with lice, which honestly feels
too relatable.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, no, it really does well, and that's because like
it or not, lice have always been with us, and
today head lice are incredibly common. It is estimated that
as many as one in four school children have them
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And since it's back to school time right now in
the Northeast, I've bet some of our listeners are dealing
with this problem. So the good news is today on
this show, we'll meet some scientists and some experts who've
dedicated their lives to understanding these creepy crawleys and also
finding ways to get them out of our hair. And
of course we'll also discover some truly surprising facts about lice,
(02:04):
including how they helped solve a long standing mystery about
human evolution, and also why you can't ground them. And
if you are someone in your household currently has lice,
do not worry. We'll get into the science of what
you should do and what you should do to deal
with them. So let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners,
(02:46):
welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Monga's Shatiicular and today
I'm joined by my producer, Mary Super producer Mary, I
should say, and over there on the other side of
the soundproof glass drinking a big glass of whey and vinegar.
It is our pal and producer, Dylan Fagan.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I don't mean to yuck Dylan's yell.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Oh you should, but yuck, that's so gross.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
The concoction does not sound appealing at all, but according
to a book of medical remedies written around sixteen hundred,
it is a sure fire away to kill lice, and
it's a lot simpler than another remedy that the same
book suggests, taking powdered scrapings from the horn of a
red deer, drinking some of it and sprinkling the rest
(03:29):
on your head. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I feel like these things would just give you a
stomach ache, although maybe that would distract you from being
itchy at least, was that the idea.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Maybe. What is interesting, though, is that even now in
twenty twenty five, there are still a lot of weird,
unproven home remedies floating around on the Internet. I found
posts telling people to wrap their heads in duct tape
or rub hot sauce on their hair, which I do
not think is a good idea. There's also an old
myth that kerosene kills lice, and that one's not just weird,
(04:00):
it's also dangerous. There have been multiple cases of people
suffering severe burns after applying kerosene and then getting too
close to a pilot light or a cigarette. I mean,
it's awful.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh God, that is awful. Look, I understand the impulse
because if you or your kids have lice, you will
try anything to get rid of them. And I should
know because I have had lice three times as an adult.
I'll say it here for everyone listening. I managed to
avoid it my entire childhood, but I have a school
age child of my own now, and I guess we
(04:30):
could say my luck ran out. Our first experience with
lice was two years ago and it was completely miserable.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, I can commiserate it, because you're definitely not alone.
I also have school age children, and my families had
lice so many times now. It is the worst and
also something I just don't understand, because, like you, it's
something I never got as a kid.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well, you know, as it happens. I know all about
that because on the show, we do research. We talked
to experts, that's what we do. So I took the
already of calling up the real expert on your family's
lice situation. I am referring to our friend of the show,
occasional writer for the show, your wife, Lizzie.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
I don't like this at all.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Tell me about the first time you guys had lace.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
What happened the first time is what has happened every
single time since then, which is that all three of
us get at ruby, Henry and me and Monkish does
every single time.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Do you resent Mangush for not getting lace one hundred percent?
Speaker 5 (05:32):
And he has like he'll do these theories about, oh,
it's the kind of hair I have, And I'm like, no,
because our children share, you know, some of your hair qualities.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
It's just that they they rub up all over me
and they just do that to Mungash in the same way.
So it's like, that's kind of all it is.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Oh man, I just remember one of those times, I
was like, Henry, were you close to anyone's head or
do you know anyone who was itching? And he didn't
think of anyone when I asked him, you know, he
was like four or five at the time. And then
later he was telling me about this game he knew
friends played where and part of the game involved pressing
your forehead against another kid's forehead to share thoughts and
(06:12):
then run away. And it was so horrified. It was like,
I asked you both these things specifically, and you were
playing a game that.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Basically you said ahead. You didn't say fourhead.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's true, but I mean he basically could have built
a bridge from his head to his friend's head. It's
just to like encourage the lights to walk over. But
I remember a nurse examining our hair in our classrooms
as a kid and telling us that certain hair was
more resistant to lice. And I'm sure that's what I
said to Lizzie at some point when she was just
(06:42):
exasperated with me.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Well, I mean, that would be nice, But scientifically speaking,
there's not a lot of evidence for that. What we
know is that anyone with hair can get lce, and
direct physical contact head to head or forehead to forehead
in your kid's case, is what makes it happen. Data
from schools have found really or social patterns of life's transmission.
So for example, a kid with lice might not spread
(07:05):
it to the kid who sits right next to them
in class, but they do spread it to their best
friend who sits on the other side of the room,
because at recess those kids are closer. Maybe they're hugging
or leaning their heads together to talk or transmit ideas telepathically.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Right, Yeah, that makes sense. But are you saying everyone's
risk of getting lice is the same if head to
head contact is equal.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Not necessarily. It's possible lice may have a harder time
gripping hair shafts that are naturally kinky or curly, and
there have been some studies that have found lower rates
of infestation among Black Americans compared to Americans of other ethnicities,
but that could also be related to different grooming practices,
different hair care products. On the flip side, there's some
(07:50):
data and anecdotal report suggesting that there are people who
are super spreaders of lice, that is, they have lice more.
But whether that means they're more likely to get them
or to have a harder time getting rid of them,
we just don't know either way. The bottom line is,
if you learn nothing else from this show, it is
that no one is totally immune to lie. If you
(08:10):
have hair, you can have lice.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Got it, So no more bragging about my miraculous lice immunity.
That's a mosquitoes love me so like, it's not all bugs,
it's just lice that seemed to have woin me. But
it's interesting that there are all these unanswered questions about
who might be at greater risk for lice, Like, is
that a big area of research right now?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, there certainly are scientists who are really interested in
this stuff, But the fact is, head lice are not
a big priority for research funding. They're considered an annoyance,
not a real medical problem, which I totally understand. But
the first time you find a lous in your kid's hair,
it sure feels like a real problem.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I know. Before we go any further, I think we
should clarify that for most of this episode we are
talking about human head lice. There are actually three types
of human lice, pubic lice or crab lice. Those are
distantly related to head lice and body lice. They're kind
of their own thing. And then body lice are very
closely related to head lice, but they took a fascinating
(09:11):
evolutionary detour that's made them different in a few critical ways.
Body lice feed on our blood, just like head lice do.
But they figured out how to live and lay their
eggs in our clothing instead of our skin or our hair,
and that actually helped solve a long standing mystery about
human evolution, the question of when people began wearing clothes.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I never thought about that question before, but now I
want to know the answer.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Well, for a long time, the best estimate we had
was that it happened sometime between forty thousand and three
million years ago, so there's a huge gap in there.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's not really a satisfying answer.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It doesn't really answer the question. But the problem is
early clothing was handmade from animal hide stuff that decayed easily,
so there's really no record for modern scientists to study. Then,
in twenty ten, came up with a much more specific
time frame for the advent of clothing, and they did
this by analyzing DNA sequences of body lice and head lice.
(10:09):
They were able to determine that body lice emerged as
a distinct ecotype of head lice at least eighty three
thousand years ago, and possibly as early as one hundred
and seventy thousand years ago, which means that's the period
when humans began wearing clothing, because otherwise there would have
been no evolutionary incentive for lice to change. And it
turns out we have a lot more to learn from
(10:29):
ancient lice. I can sum it up in a single word, archaeoparasitology.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
That feels like it should be multiple words. That's one word.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
I know it's too long to be three scrapple bingos,
but it is exactly what it sounds like. It's the
study of parasites in the context of archaeology, So that
means looking at how parasites affected ancient people and even
studying evidence of parasites in mummies. Now, thanks to this discipline,
we know that lice were widespread in prehistoric times. The
(11:00):
oldest direct record of lice infestation is a ten thousand
year old intact louse egg that was found in a
Brazilian mummy's hair.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Wow, so that's thousands of years before the inscribed louse
comb I told you about at the top, and even
more thousands of years before Dylan's vinegar and waite concoction.
So what did people do back then to get rid
of lice? Do we know?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah? In prehistoric times, one of the most common ways
of dealing with lice was to simply pick them out
of people's hair and eat them. And we know that
happened because adult lice have been found in copper lights,
which is of course fossilized extrement, which is gross. Yeah,
but it's also kind of wonderful, right, Like, the historic
record is written in places where a lot of us
(11:42):
would never really think to look. So I'm grateful for
the people who dig through it, literally, and I'm also
grateful that I don't have to eat my kid's lice.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, we've come a long way. We've come a long way. Well,
speaking of which, I want to fast forward from prehistoric
to medieval times because during the Middle Ages, people developed
some pretty wacky theories about where lice and other parasites
come from. They didn't understand how transmission happened, so they
concluded that lice were the result of spontaneous generation. In
(12:13):
other words, they believed lice originated in so called corrupt
matter like dirt and bodily fluids, which is how he
got the idea that having lice is a sign of
bad hygiene, an idea that's kind of still around today,
even though we know it's really not true. But there
was another way of looking at lice. Back then, some
people viewed lice infestation as proof of humility and moral goodness, so.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
They actually thought that lice were a good thing.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, because holy men and women often gave up grooming
along with other worldly concerns, so if they got lice,
instead of removing them, they would just ignore them, which
of course meant they spread. There was actually this bishop
named Thomas Decantelope, that was his name, who was canonized
in thirteen twenty, and during that process some of his
servants testify on his behalf that he was always covered
(13:02):
in lice, and this was meant to prove that he
was a true man of God who didn't allow himself
to be distracted by frivolous things like combing his hair.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
That sounds absolutely miserable.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
That was the point. But just how miserable Bishop to
Cantelope was would depend on his immune system, because the
itching we experience when we have lice is an allergic
reaction to the lous bites, and some people have milder
reactions than others. In fact, some people don't really itch
at all, which of course makes it easier for them
to spread lice because they are not immediately aware that
(13:35):
they have them.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I mean, I think my son ished his head a lot,
but Ruby didn't really, And I mean I remember thinking like,
how can there be so many lice? Heer in not
scratching harder.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
My kid was the same way. I was so itchy.
I couldn't sleep when I had lice because I was
itching so badly. Meanwhile, my kid is just walking around
and he actually did have more lice than I did
in the final tally. But I just must be more
sensitive to the bites, you know, like some people get
itchier with a mosquito bite than other people. It's just
your immune system.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Well, I was definitely scratching a lot, just knowing that
my kids had lice and I didn't have any. But
the good news is there are ways to deal with
lice that don't involve vinegar, kerosene or becoming a saint.
And after this quick break, we're going to hear from
a scientist. He invented something called the lausbuster, and we'll
learn how a common skincare product makes lice explode. So
(14:32):
don't go anywhere. Welcome back to a very itchy episode
of Part Time genius. I know this is a weird
thing to say when we're talking about lice, but if
(14:54):
you enjoy what you're hearing, please leave us a nice
rating and review and share this episode with a friend.
If you know anyone who's a parent of school age kids,
I guarantee they'll want to hear this part at least. Okay, Mary,
So here's something I learned about back when my kids
first Got Life, and that is the fact that a
lot of the over the counter a chemical products just
don't work. In fact, my friend Nick, who grew up
(15:18):
closer to my age, he said that he used to
Get Life so much that his friends used to call
him Nix because there was a product called Nicks.
Speaker 6 (15:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's still on the lind Yeah. But I
looked into it and it turns out that lies have
developed resistance to the insecticides that were used for years
to treat people like Nick. And this is just a
natural thing that happens. And we see this with other
bugs too. For example, farmers often have to come up
with solutions when pests develop resistance to common ag pesticides.
(15:49):
Another analogy, and one that's really serious, is antibiotic resistance,
right you hear about this all the time, But these
examples all follow the same evolutionary principle. Some bo are
able to survive exposure to chemicals or drugs, and they
pass that hardiness onto their offspring, and over time those
traits just get stronger and stronger. The resistance spreads through
(16:11):
the population and it's awful for us.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, yeah, no, I've heard about this. In the case
of antibiotic resistance, I know it can have really serious
public health consequences.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah. So, Luckily, headlights are different in that they don't
carry disease. So even if your drug store shampoo doesn't work,
having headlights won't make you sick. It just really makes
you itchy. Now, body lies are a different story. Remember
we talked about how they evolve the ability to live
in our clothes instead of our hair. Well, somewhere along
the way they also managed to become disease vectors. So,
(16:42):
during World War One, a disease called trench fever affected thousands,
maybe even millions, of troops, and doctors discovered later that
it was caused by a bacteria carried by the common
body loss, which flourished in the crowded conditions of trench
warfare now. Dale Clayton at the University of Utah is
an evolutionary biologist and life expert, and he told us
(17:03):
that this tiny but important difference is something he spends
a lot of time thinking about.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
One of the most pressing questions about human life is
why do we have life that vector nasty things, that
live primarily in clothing but still take blood males from
humans and life that are technically the same species that
live on the heads of one out of four school
(17:29):
kids all across the country, and one is dangerous and
the other is basically harmless. And how long will it
take before head life evolves the ability to vector nasty things?
Will that ever happen? It could happen in ten years
or a million years, We don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Okay, First of all, I realize it is the scientific
term for what lifess do, but taking blood meals from
humans sounds like the tigeline for a horror movie. I'm
to have chills just thinking about this. But and second,
this is actually terrifying. Is he saying that headlights could
evolve the ability to make us sick?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah? I mean it is possible. There's no indication it's happening, right, now,
but this is the kind of thing evolutionary biologists have
to consider, which is why it's in our best interest
to have a really effective way of treating headlince. But
to back up for a second, Dale actually does most
of his work with feather lice that live on birds.
Unlike human headlights, they don't take blood meals. They eat feathers,
(18:31):
which is pretty wild to think about, and he's been
working with feather lice for decades. In fact, when he
was a grad student, he named a new species of
owl feather laughs, after the cartoonist Gary Larson, who was
so excited that he drew a picture of it and
published it in his nineteen eighty nine book The Prehistory
of the Far Side.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I wasn't sure where that was going, but that is
not where I thought we would end up. I do
love it, though. What a strange honor to have a
laus named after you.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
It's kind of wonderful, it really is.
Speaker 7 (18:59):
So.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
As a veteran life expert, of course, Dale knew about
human headlights developing resistance to insecticides, but he wasn't focused
on finding a treatment for them until his own kids
got lice and he realized he didn't know what to do.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
My wife was kind of angry because she says, you're
all the world authorities on lice and you don't even
know how to get rid of lice on our kids.
What's going on? So that was a motivator.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I should note here that he's referring to his first wife.
This is actually relevant to this discussion because his second
wife also studies lie. They've even named species of lice
after their kids.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
The dinner table conversations at the Clayton household must be fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I think they probably are. Anyway, Dale's pondering his kids
head lice, and then he remembers a weird problem he
had back when he first moved to Utah. And this
was after teaching in the Midwest and the UK.
Speaker 6 (19:51):
I discovered, to my dismay, I couldn't keep lice alive
on pigeons here, and it took about a year to
figure out that the reason is it's too arid.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So what's interesting is that lice can't live in tanks
or petri dishes. They can only survive on a living host.
So when Dale was setting up his lab at the
University of Utah, he got a bunch of pigeons so
you could study their feather lice. And the pigeons were fine.
The feather lice were not. Since they aren't blood sucking lice.
They rely on moisture from the air for hydration, and
(20:23):
the air in Utah is really dry, so the only
way to keep his lab lice alive was to modify
the ambient humidity. So when drug store shampoos failed his
own kids, it occurred to him that maybe dry air
could be the key to killing headlights that are resistant
to all the chemical treatment.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
And so we started tankeering with different approaches. The University
of Utah is one of the best universities in the
country for entrepreneurial work. There's money for researchers to try
weird things, get like pre med students involved in those projects,
and so we started pursuing this possibility of using heated air,
(21:03):
and after a while we figured out how to make
it work, and then we got bigger dings to develop
an actual medical device.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Dale and his team called their invention the Lousebuster. The
name has since been changed to air Alay because of
a trademark issue, but the way it works is it
blows heated air through a hose that's attached to an
applicator that you comb slowly through your hair.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So like a very precise hair dryer.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Kind of, but instead of blowing air over the hair,
it's actually getting down to the surface of your head
where the lice are. And more importantly, it's getting to
the eggs, which lice glue to hair shafts right next
to the scalp. And the temperature is carefully calibrated to
dry out the lice without burning your skin. In the
test he did with local kids living in Salt Lake City,
Dale found that his device killed live lice and it
(21:54):
prevented the eggs from hatching. It took over a year
to dial in the right temperatures and tree in juration,
but it finally became this viable medical device.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So wait, is this something I can just go buy
and keep at home in case we ever get lice again?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
You know, I had the same thought, But it would
actually be pretty expensive as a consumer device, and you
do need to be trained to use it correctly. But
Dale licensed the Airla device to this network called Lyfe's
Clinics of America. This is not an AD, but they
have locations around the country and people with lice can
make an appointment to go in for treatment.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Wow, I wish I had known about that when we
had lice, well like you and Lizzie and Dale Clayton
and millions of other people who have dealt with head lice.
The first thing I tried was a drug store shampoo
and a little plastic comb that came with it. Both
of these things were completely useless. Luckily, I do nitpicky
research for a living, so I dove into the literature
(22:47):
on lice and emerged with an idea one hundred percent
food grade dimethicone.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Wait, so what it is is?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
So it's a type of silicone that's often used in
cosmetics as a skin protectant. Does is It forms a
protective barrier that locks in moisture, and it really doesn't
have a lot of downsides. It's not toxic, it's not flammable,
it's totally inert. It can even be an ingredient in
cooking oils. You can actually consume it. So the way
I got rid of our life was by coating my
(23:16):
head and my kid's head in a generous, sticky pore
of dimethicone, let it sit for a while, did a
thorough combing and then washed it out. That was actually
the hardest part because it is so thick, so slippery
and water resistant. It took like four rounds of washing
to get out.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
It sounds like an oil slickers. Yeah, how does this
stuff kill lice? Like, if it's non toxic, does it
suffocate them? Or what's happening?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Well, that's what I assumed was happening, that they were
drowning or suffocating. But I wasn't sure, so I called
up Ian Burgess, a world renowned scientist and the director
of a company called Insect Research and Development that investigates
ways of controlling insects that impact public health, like lice.
But before we get to the science, you should know
that Ian has an interesting perspective on lace.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
When I was a master's student, I opted to work
on crab or cubic lice because I felt sorry for
them because nobody had actually done any work on them
really for about forty five fifty years before that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
You felt sorry for the pubic lace?
Speaker 7 (24:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Why not?
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (24:25):
And if you've been ignored scientifically, surely they werenant some sympathy.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I don't know if I quite share his perspective, but
I guess I do understand whying to study the things
that everyone else overlooks.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, exactly, And when it comes to lice, a lot
of people overlook them. Not Ian, though, So I asked
him when I poured dimethicone on my head, did I
suffocate the lice?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
It's almost impossible to suffocate a loss. You can put
them in an environment without breath of oxygen for quite
a long time. I've had lices that have been immersed
in water for twelve hours, so clearly they can't breathe.
You can take them out and dry them off, warm
them up, and pack their backside so they will walk away.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Wait, that is unbelievable. Underwater for twelve hours and they
are totally fine. How do lies do that?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, to drastically oversimplify it, they enter something like a
power saving mode. But it just goes to show you
that head lies are really not easy to kill. And
to explain why damethicone does kill them, I have to
tell you a little bit about laus anatomy. So human
headlights feed on blood, which is mostly water. For most creatures,
(25:42):
consuming liquid eventually leads to urination, but head lice only
produce dry feces. And Ian told me that's because peeing
on our heads would alert us to their presence a
lot faster.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Right, That is not a sense I was expecting you
to say this episode.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
We're full of surprise today. Okay, So they can't pee, right,
The lyuse can't pee, but they still need to get
rid of liquid waste, so they do it through a
process called spiracular transpiration. Now, spiracles are tiny respiratory openings
on the louse's exoskeleton that lead to the trachea or
the airway, and they help maintain this very precise equilibrium
(26:21):
where excess water in the louse's body goes into the
trachea and then out through the spiracles. What the dmethicone
does is it coats and plugs these little openings so
nothing can get in and crucially, nothing can get out.
The louse doesn't know this. Its body is trying to
pump extra water into the trachea, but it has nowhere
(26:41):
to go, so it flows back into the gut. And
after a little while this throws off the equilibrium completely
and all that extra pressure just builds up inside.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
And if the louse had fed just before it was coated.
In fact, you can see the louse gut explode.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
I mean, it is stunning that you didn't suffocate your
lives but you blew them up instead. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Technically, yeah, there is one caveat here, and that is
Dimethicone can kill live lice, but it cannot kill knits.
It can't kill the eggs. So if you just do
one treatment, any eggs left in your hair.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Will hatch and then you'll be overwhelm with lice again.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well not right away, so it takes eggs up to
ten days to hatch, and lice can't reproduce until they
are about eleven to fourteen days old. Obviously, you have
no way of knowing the age of all the knits
in your hair. You don't have like a little louse
sensus that you can refer to. But you can kill
the newly hatched lice before they reach maturity with a
little careful planning. So here's what you do. After your
(27:46):
first dimethicone treatment, wait five days and do it again.
You'll kill anything that hatched in those days directly following
that initial application. Then you wait five more days and repeat.
That should ensure that all the eggs have hatched, but
none of the living lice are old enough to lay
eggs on their own, and of course you can use
a good comb to remove nits and lice in between
(28:06):
these applications for extra peace of mind.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I mean, I have to say, you sound like a
full time life's genius.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I wish I could take credit for all of this,
but the truth is, everything I know about this dimethicone
treatment schedule I learned from a woman in Wisconsin who
is basically the Martha Stewart of lice, and will get
to meet her after this quick break. Welcome back to
(28:43):
a lousy episode of Part Time Genius. So mangush. We've
touched on this a little bit, but I want to
get into it some more. And that is the emotional
impact of having lice. When I spoke to Lizzy, I
told her how I had an existential crisis the first
time we got lis. I just I didn't know what
to do. There was all this conflict information online. I
read one thing that said I needed to bag up
(29:04):
all my kid's toys and bedding and seal it away
for ten days. My kid was upset and embarrassed. It
just felt so overwhelming, and at some point I remember
sitting on the bathroom floor, like why, why us, Why
me why now right? I felt crazy and Lizzie was like, no, no,
you're not crazy. I get it.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
There are dangerous places my mind can definitely go to,
like how is this tiny, tiny thing alaos is tiny
and it is tinier.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
How can they like wreak so much havoc and like
take me down?
Speaker 5 (29:38):
You know, a bear is more likely to like kill me,
I guess, but this lous is still really out my life.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I mean that is so true. Oh my god. Every
time we got lies, it was such an ordeal and
it felt like, why is this happening? He was you
feel dirty, you get stripped the beds. We took all
the stuffed animals away and then spent hours in the
bathroom with little kids who did not want it's still
putting thick shampoo into their hair and trying to comb
out the eggs and it was just so miserable and
(30:07):
you think you're done and then it happens again. But
you know, eventually we got rid of them by going
to a professional lice combing service here in Brooklyn. But yeah,
it's just one more thing you have to deal with
and figure out, and for busy parents, it's just the worst.
And even though you know lice are harmless. There's such
a stigma that you don't want your kids to give
it to others. You feel like you haven't taken care
(30:27):
of your kids. It really can take a toll.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
It can, and that is where Laurie Moyer comes in.
Laurie runs a life's treatment center in Wisconsin, but she
reaches hundreds of thousands of people all around the world
through social media. She has over one hundred and twenty
seven thousand followers on TikTok, where she posts videos demystifying
lice and teaching proper combing techniques, and she's basically the
all powerful voice of reason on the Our Life's subreddit,
(30:52):
where every day anxious people post questions about how to
tell if this thing they found is allows and what
to do if it is actually Now Laurie's read it
posts about dimethicone. When I was panicking the first time
we had lice, she was just so patient and calm
and detailed in her responses. It made me feel for
the first time like maybe I could handle this. And
(31:12):
when I talked to her on the phone for this episode,
she told me that keeping people calm is a big
part of her job.
Speaker 7 (31:18):
What I see happening quite often is someone will get
a notice from their child's daycare or their child's school
that there is a case of lice, a confirmed case
of lice, and then they become panicked. It just spirals
into complete chaos, and I try to talk people, you know,
back down.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Part of that panic, Laurie says, comes from misunderstanding lice
and how they live. A lot of people think, like
you did, that having life means they have to deep
clean their whole house and throw out the clothes, vacuum
the furniture, bag up the toys. Of course, that's going
to feel daunting.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Now.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Some lives can survive for a few hours on surfaces
that aren't human heads. But here's the thing, they're not bad.
They really can't live very long without us.
Speaker 7 (32:03):
And I liken it to being a human being an
outer space. Right, if you were up in a rocket ship,
a capsule, whatever, But if you were up beyond the
Earth's atmosphere, could you potentially open that hatch and go
out into outer space? You could, sure, But why wouldn't
you because you couldn't survive there. There's no oxygen there,
(32:27):
you couldn't survive. So the same is true for headlights.
They need your head to survive, and if they were
to come off the head, it's either because they're dying
or dyed, or maybe you disturbed your hair in some
way that knocked them off the head. But they're going
to just crawl back in the hair if they can.
They certainly aren't readily walking off of a human head
to go on a squish mellow.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
I mean, I would be lying right now if I
said I wasn't picturing a tiny louse in an astronaut suit.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
I think we all are. I think we all are.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You know this might sound weird, but this episode has
kind of made me, I don't want to say fond
of lies, but I certainly respect them more than I
did before we started learning all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah, same, Ian Burgess actually had a really wonderful way
of putting this.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
These animals have lived on humans since humans began, and
their forebears before that, and throughout that time, to varying degrees,
we have tried to get rid of them, and they've
survived every one of those challenges and they're still doing
it and there are still so many things we need
(33:32):
to learn about them. If you ever looked down a
microscope at a little louse going about its business. It's
a fascinating, really actually quite beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Oh I love that. I mean, if my kids get
lies again, I'll want to get rid of them, for sure.
But now I'm kind of wondering, like, does that mean
I want to get rid of all this? I'm not
totally sure.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I'm so glad you brought that up, because I asked
Ian that exact question. What would happen or what would
change in the world if we woke up tomorrow and
all human had lives were gone?
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Nothing, as far as I know, other than the fact
that we would have had an extinction. I mean, it's
a This is a marable question, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (34:18):
It is?
Speaker 3 (34:18):
I think Yeah. It's an ethical question anyway, What apart
from our squeamishness, what right have we to decide that
life are less valuable than something else? Okay, we consider
ourselves or humans consider themselves the peak of evolution. But
(34:40):
where do you draw the line? Okay, a louse may
not be what you want, but then what about, say,
something like a worm in your gut? Parasitic worms can
often eliminate on certainly on a temporary basis for allergies.
So they have a function, and it could be that
(35:01):
lice have a function. We just haven't pinned it down yet.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
I never thought of that. But you know, we go
back to school in September, and if we get lice again,
I feel like I'll be much more emotionally prepared for it.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Love your Lice. Well, there was a school we went to.
We've done coming in schools for years, and there was
one school we went to where the kids are about
six years old. Some of the kids cried because they
didn't have lice and their friends did, and the ones
(35:37):
who had lice then had disagreements as to who had
the best lice.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Oh my god, kids are the best. That's so funny.
My life could beat up your life. My life are
faster than your life.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Sure so, in fact, all the fear and hatred and
squeamishness and things about life come from adults, not from children.
Children only feel bad about life because adults thrust this
upon them.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Okay, can we make part time genius t shirts that
say love your lice?
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Absolutely not. That is too far, But you know what
we can do. We can head down to the rec
Center to sum up everything we've learned today about what
to do if you or someone in your house has lice.
(36:37):
Step one, remain calm. Headlights are a nuisance, but they
are not dangerous, and there's really nothing to be embarrassed about.
At any given moment. Millions of people have lice, so
you're definitely in good company.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Step two. Buy a good quality metal nitcomb and check
online for videos that show the right way to use it.
The comb I used and the one Laurie Morier recommends,
has a round handle and lots of long, thin teeth
with little grooves that help snag the lice and eggs.
And actually, if you have school age kids, Laurie suggests
doing regular comb throughs with the nitcomb as a preventative measure,
(37:11):
because if you catch an infestation early, it is so
much easier to treat and contain.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Step three, figure out your treatment plan. You can search
for a professional lyce clinic in your area or DIY
with dimethicone, but you don't need to throw out your
clothes or spend days deep cleaning like we did. And
it's probably not worth bothering with those drug store shampoos either.
They just don't work that well anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Step four. If you're using dimethicone at home, like I did,
be sure to follow the schedule exactly. Apply on day one,
day five, and day ten. Oh and I asked Lauri
if it's possible to do this if you have braids
or locks you don't want to take out, and she
said yes, you can apply the domethicone directly to the
scalp without undoing them, but you will need to wash
it out. Speaking of which, here is a bonus tip
(37:54):
from me. A person with long thick care, regular shampoo
did not cut through the dimethicone very well, so I
handed up U sing Don dish soap. It worked, but
it is very rough on your hair, so use plenty
of conditioner afterwards.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Well, Marry, since you've battled lized yourself and I've always
escaped unscathed, I think you deserve today's trophy.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
You know what, I'll take it. It means the suffering
was worth something.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I'm glad you have that justification. Well, that does it
for today. We will be back next week with another
new episode. In the meantime, you can send us a
message by emailing High Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's hi.
Geniuses at gmail dot com or give us a call
at three oh two, four oh five, five nine two five. Seriously,
give us a call. We love hearing your messages. Sometimes
(38:41):
we play them on the show. We love to get
more of them. Special thanks to everyone we spoke with
for this episode, and from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself.
Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(39:05):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
by Will Pearson and Me Mongish Heatikler and researched by
our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and
produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell
(39:26):
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
trustee Dara Potts and buy Me Shoring. For more podcasts
from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
What Are We Even Doing? with Kyle MacLachlan
Join award-winning actor and social media madman Kyle MacLachlan on “What Are We Even Doing,” where he sits down with Millennial and Gen Z actors, musicians, artists, and content creators to share stories about the entertainment industry past, present, and future. Kyle and his guests will talk shop, compare notes on life, and generally be weird together. In a good way. Their conversations will resonate with listeners of any age whose interests lie in television & film, music, art, or pop culture.