Annemarie Quill: Unwelcome visitors must be stopped

"We've had visitors," my mother-in-law whispered enigmatically, when she dropped off the children.

I looked at her blankly.

I would have never put her as a UFO spotter but I had only just met her. We had just moved to Tauranga and were in the middle of moving house.

"You know, creatures," she said, pointing to the kids. "I don't want to say in front of them."

Worried if madness ran in the family, and perplexed, I scratched my head.

"Looks like you've got visitors too."

If only it had been aliens.

One glance down at my son's head told the story. His blond hair seemed to have highlights. Moving highlights. No, crawling highlights. Crawling with ... I screamed loudly

Lice. Nits.

The horror.

Memories of "Nitty Nora the Head Explorer" from my childhood flooded back. Aka the "nit nurse," who visited school to examine our hair.

Pity the child who was found with creatures, as whispers hissed around the whole school. But it was only the odd child, not the whole school.

Nits, disgusting nits. Lice.

It seems like such a Third World thing.

But here in New Zealand, we are told, it is just the norm.

A horrible norm. Why do we tolerate it?

As Unichem Cherrywood Pharmacy owner Sam Appleford says, in Michele Hunter's story on the growing scourge of nits in the Bay, nits are "an ongoing saga" for families.

That day when my mother-in-law spotted the nits, was just the first of many.

Back that day I couldn't bring myself to even go near the children's heads. I watched aghast as my mother-in-law combed and sprayed my babies and plonked them out on the deck, green shower caps on, drunk on the heady scent of tea tree oil. Our new neighbours popped over to introduce themselves.

"We have nits," explained my daughter cheerily.

Little did we know how these "visitors" would become an unwelcome, regular family ritual.

When I imagined motherhood, I knew it wouldn't all be all teddy bears, bedtime stories and pushing swings. There would be snotty noses, dirty nappies and a lifetime of no sleep.

But never did I imagine that one of my weekly jobs would be an insect hunter and killer.

That Sunday nights would be a Sisyphean battle of metal-pronged combs, caustic chemicals, tugging hair and tears. As fast as the hard-bodied brown monsters dropped from heads into the white sink, my children's tears plopped in behind them.

Sometimes followed by my own - with half my sobbing for putting them through pain, and half for the pain of spending hundreds of dollars per year on nit treatments.

Monday they embark, nitless, to school, the girls' ponytails scraped back with my best Moroccan Oil hairspray. Only to return home again with more bugs.

In some ways, I can't blame some parents for just giving up.

The spread of nits comes down to parents' vigilance, say the pharmacists in our story today.

It only works if it is a collective effort from the community. Appleford hits it on the head,

"We get a lot of frustrated parents where a lot of the kids [at their school] may not have been treated, or treated as well," he said.

I do not buy principal's Geoff Opie's response in our article that responsibility for treatment rests with the family.

Schools would not tolerate children attending with infectious diseases.

Why not send home children with nits? That soon would get parents treating them. As Opie himself says, not all parents accept the responsibility of nit killing, so why should other children also suffer? The treatments are costly and might be out of reach for many families.

But a cheap, thick conditioner and a metal comb are likely just as effective. Plus prescriptions are available.

I do not accept that lice are just something we have to live with as the norm. If we went to our workplaces and caught lice, our employer would have a legal responsibility under health and safety regulations to address the problem.

Why are children not afforded the same respect?

Treating children every week is not only costly, but constant chemicals damage their scalp and hair. It's torture.

That children can no longer be treated at school because of privacy is a nonsensical rule that means that nits remain in the community, with our children's health and wellbeing at risk.

The Ministries of Education and Health needs to address the regulations around nits and lice.