I’m a public health nurse and I have a weekly public radio program, Healthstyles, in New York City. Fifteen years ago, when my kids were preschoolers, there was a local outbreak of head lice, and parents kept asking me to do a show about it. I thought it was a boring topic. They persisted and I did the show.

During that radio show I invited listeners to call in; in radio-speak, “the board lit up.” A mom called and said she’d applied an OTC shampoo for head lice, in three separate applications, to her six-year-old son’s head, but he still had nits and live lice—what should she do? A father reported that he’d applied another OTC  shampoo for head lice to his nine-year-old daughter’s head, wrapped her head in plastic wrap, and let her sleep through the night that way; he asked, “Was that dangerous to do?” Producing this segment opened my eyes to how little we knew about the health effects of such treatments on children. It was a nursing “Aha!” moment: head lice weren’t just a big nuisance, they were a serious public health issue. […]