SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA
THE WASHINGTON POST |
WIRE SERVICE
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with the new school year starting, now there’s this: “selfie lice.” In recent days, the Internet has been abuzz with fear over the latest scourge to hit our borders, and it has to do with social media and those pesky little critters that tend to latch onto kids’ hair.
The concern is that gaggles of tweens and teens with smartphones are touching heads while snapping and sharing pictures of themselves, causing a rise in lice transmissions.
No one seems to know where the idea originated, but some point to the selfie-seen-around-the-world that Ellen Degeneres took at last year’s Oscars. That led to snarky comments online about how close those beautiful heads — Jennifer Lawrence! Brad Pitt! Julia Roberts! Bradley Cooper! — appeared to be to each other and speculation about what might happen if any one of them had lice.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten about this for a while but as the summer ended and people began to think about school again, comments from a pediatrician in Wisconsin who spoke about seeing a rise in lice cases among teens went viral. Soon, experts from across the country, from cities big and small, were weighing in and saying that they, too, were alarmed about selfie lice.
It sounds bad, but there’s no need to panic. Let’s separate fact from fiction. First, experts say transmitting lice while taking a selfie is technically possible, but since lice cannot fly or jump, they’d have to crawl, and that can take a while, so you’d probably have to be head-to-head with your gal pal for longer than a few seconds.