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Tough Love: Pubic Lice (Crabs) and Scabies
How to cure a case of the creepy crawlies when they're living in your pants
November 10, 1999
All week long, Leah will be covering various STDs in Tough Love. Here's the schedule:
Monday Safe Sex 101, Part Five: Herpes and Chancroid
Tuesday Tough Love: Human Papilloma Virus (Warts)
Wednesday Tough Love: Pubic Lice (Crabs) and Scabies
Thursday Tough Love: Trichomoniasis
Friday Tough Love: Hepatitis Virus
So please! Keep coming back and reading about all these STDs!
 Remember! Safe Sex can help prevent the transmission of STDs. The only foolproof method is abstinence. Otherwise, please use a condom with proper lubrication - and don't keep your condoms in your wallet for too long, or they'll break! For more information on other methods of contraception, please check out the other Safe Sex 101 features.
Looking for the other sections? You can find them here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
This information is simply for your education. Leah’s not telling you to have sex or to not have sex (that’s a personal decision, and to read more of my thoughts on that topic, please refer to Safe Sex 101, Part One. Please read the entire series before you send me angry emails!). My mission is just to give you information so you'll know how to keep yourself as safe as possible.
Remember too that while Leah can answer all sorts of questions and keep you informed she (thankfully) can't see those parts you might be worried about. So if you do have something you think you should be worried about, like discharge, a sore, or if you're in pain, please go see a doctor as soon as you can! Don't be embarrassed. It's more than likely the doctor's seen much worse than you can offer, and the sooner you get it checked out, the sooner you can get it fixed. Anyone can get an STD, so we all need to be equally careful and aware.
Pubic Lice ("Crabs") and Scabies
Remember when you were little and your parents wouldn't let you have a pet? Not even one that stayed in a tank or a cage? Well, with lice and scabies, you don't have just one little friend, you've got an entire family! Lice and scabies are teeny insects. Scabies are caused by a mite known as Sarcoptes scabiei, and pubic lice or "crabs" are caused by a louse called Phthirus pubis. When you first get infested, you won't know right away. Lice take up to a week to make their presence known, and scabies might not cause any itching for a full month. However, if you get infected a second time, you'll know after a day.
Lice and scabies take up residence in the pubic area, around the penis or vagina. It's extremely easy to transmit them. Skin-to-skin contact can pass them on, but so can secondary contact. For example, they will live in other areas of your body, not just the genital area, so you can get them through non-sexual contact. Condoms won't help keep them away! Also, if you just lie in the bed of someone who's infected, they get onto your skin.
Both insects feed off you. The lice hang around and bite your skin in order to suck your blood, while the scabies mite will lay its eggs in your skin. Both of these cause lots and lots of redness and itching. You will most certainly be tempted to scratch pubic lice in public! The other symptoms are slightly different for both. If you have lice, you'll be able to see the insects and their eggs in your pubic hair, and the skin beneath could be red and scaly. Scabies, on the other hand, are in the skin, so you'll see bumps, and perhaps blisters and crusty skin. Oh, and did I mention the itching? Luckily, unlike many of the other STDs, there aren't any big long-term complications from lice or scabies. Sure, if you scratch too hard and too much, you can start bleeding. And yeah, it's pretty embarrassing! But don't worry about it too much. Way more people than you'd expect have had a little infestation. Cure yourself, have a good laugh, learn a lesson, and don't let it bug you (pun definitely intended).
The good thing about both scabies and lice is that they're completely curable. If you've got scabies, you'll have to apply a special skin lotion (like Kwell) to your entire body. It only takes a few days to treat scabies, but even after they go away, some people will still have residual itching (that can actually last up to a month). Pubic lice is cured by using either a cream or shampoo, which you can get at the local pharmacy without a prescription. Basically, you use the same stuff as if you had head lice - Kwell, or something like lindane or pemethrin (it's toxic, so pregnant women and kids have to be careful). You may want to shave off all the pubic hair if you've got lice (which destroys their housing complex), but simply doing this won't cure it completely. You have to do it in conjunction with the Kwell treatment. And please, follow the instructions on the bottle! You often have to use the Kwell a second time (after a certain time period) to make sure you completely kill any residual eggs.
It's also very important to thoroughly wash all your sheets, bed clothes, and regular clothes. You have to wash them in hot water (as hot as possible) and set the dryer on the highest heat level. If you don't do this, and there are lice or mites hanging out on your sheets or in your underwear (which you'll hopefully wash regularly regardless), they can hop back on you or someone else. And then it's the whole process all over again! It's generally a good idea to clean your house too (vacuum and dust). Hey, it probably needs a good scrubbing anyway!
- Leah Reich doesn't want you spraying Raid down your pants!
Want to read more by Leah? Hop to the Dating section. Or go straight to the daily advice column, Ask Leah, where Leah answers your questions about dating, sex, relationships, friends, parents, and life in general.
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