Kerre Woodham: Time to get tough on nits

One day, when I am Queen, I'm going to issue a decree that all the school swimming pools in the land will be emptied of water and filled with drench. And then all the little children will be lined up in single file, and closely inspected for head lice.

Those who are infected will walk the length of the swimming pool and be dunked under sporadically, thoroughly dousing their hair.

This will happen every week, and eventually there will come a time when this land will be free of head lice.

Nits were the bane of my life when my daughter was little. She had long, thick hair - a veritable nit nirvana - and like every other parent of a school-age child, we tried everything. Every dose, every potion, every natural remedy, every electronic comb.

Years of my life were spent standing over her as she sat stoically in a chair, painstakingly combing through her hair, trying to find the little suckers, and then doing the same to my own hair.

I'm scratching even as I write this, remembering the horror of head lice. I have little sympathy for the parents who used animal flea treatments on their children's heads - really! There are limits.

But I'm right with those parents calling for a return to the old days when a public health nurse would check every child for lice and treat those who were infected.

The nurse could start at the head looking for lice, and then work her way down the kids' bodies, checking for bruises, broken bones and malnourishment which a significant number of children suffer as well.

At least nits are egalitarian. They don't care what your home address is, or what car your dad drives. They're equal-opportunity pests. And the sooner we stop stuffing around and pretending that it's better for the children to protect their privacy and their parents' feelings than it is to take them out of class and keep them away until the nits are gone, the better.

I know a lot of parents work, so have an isolation room, where the nitty ones can congregate until such time as the uninvited tenants are gone. It cannot be good for children to be doused in chemicals at least once every few months from the time they're 5 until the time they leave primary school at the age of 10. But even the most hippie dippy of parents seems willing to set aside their organic, herbal, natural approach to life when it comes to dealing with nits.