Living back in Pilsen a neighborhood in the city of Chicago, I must’ve been about six or seven years old, I can remember my mom told me, “I told you so!” She had previously told me to not go play with the kids next door because they were infested with head lice and that they would pass them to me. At that time I didn’t know what head lice were, and when my mom told me that I didn 't listen, all I cared was about having fun and going to play with my friends next door. Eventually it happened, my mom searched my head and found head lice on my head and plenty of nits. She sat down with me near a window with a white towel on her lap and just started combing through my hair. Pediculus humanus capitis is the scientific name to what is most commonly known to us as the head lice. The head louse is a Eukaryote that belongs to the Animalia kingdom and is categorized as an obligate parasite. An obligate parasite needs a host in order to complete its life cycle. Without a host the head lice are unable to reproduce and survive. Head lice must feed off another living body to survive. Their source of food is human blood, which they get from the scalp. The head louse starts off as an egg also known as nits. Nits take about a week to hatch. After that, the egg releases a …show more content…
A head lice nit was discovered around 8,000BC in the hair of a buried mummy in Brazil and later on around 3,000BC on combs and hair of an Egyptian mummy. In 1667 the feeding habit of a louse was a subject of microscopy in the book, Micrographia: Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon by English scientist Robert Hooke. Hooke let a louse suck from his hand to observe how his blood traveled through its insides. In the United States the first record of head lice is from the early 1800’s in Wisconsin, where a comb made from bone was found with