Maddening Itch

Once the bane of streetwalkers and their patrons, Phthirus pubis, or the crab louse, is exhibiting upward mobility. As sexual barriers tumble, the tenacious parasites are infesting more and more middle-class youngsters. One reason, says Boston Dermatologist A. Bernard Ackerman in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that the bugs are making the scene at hippie love-ins. And it is only a short hop from the crash pad to the college crowd.

Implacably tough and hard to pick off, the lice resemble real crabs. There the similarity ends. No longer or wider than one or two millimeters, they are usually invisible to the naked eye, and nestle most often in the pubic area (though they occasionally stray to the scalp, eyelashes and other thickets of body hair). They use their powerful jaws to feed leisurely on the blood of their hosts for hours at a time. For whites they are particularly irksome because their yellowish-grey color is a natural camouflage on Caucasian skin.

Unlike their body-lice cousins, they are not known as carriers of any disease. But they cause such a maddening itch that anyone harboring them is invariably driven to a pharmacist or a doctor, no matter how embarrassing the visit may be. A simple cure, says Dermatologist Ackerman, is to apply a 1% solution of gamma-benzene hexachloride, either as a cream, lotion or shampoo, to the troubled area. Nevertheless, since the presence of Phthirus pubis is usually the result of sexual contact, he urges all physicians who come upon such scratching patients to examine them for gonorrhea and syphilis as well.

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