Family Gets Booted From Flight Due To Son’s Head Lice
Many people on social media have mixed feelings about a recent incident on A Delta Airlines flight. Sports analyst, Clay Travis and his family were kicked off their flight after had lice were found on their 6-year-old son’s head.
Travis’s Website
Travis turned to his website to write about his family’s frustrating experience. His kids had been around cousins who had lice a few weeks before their trip to Paris. As a precaution, Travis’s wife treated their children with over-the-counter lice treatments and gave them regular baths and combed their hair. They never spotted any signs of lice during their trip in London and Paris.
“Until, that is, halfway over the Atlantic Ocean when my six year old son needed to go the bathroom…While he was standing in line for the bathroom, my six year old started to scratch his head. My wife checked to see why he was scratching his head and saw then that he had lice. Several flight attendants rushed over too and peered down at my son’s head. ‘Oh, my God, he has lice,’ they said.”
How It Went Down
Flight attendants told the Travis family that they wouldn’t be able to leave the plane when they land in Minneapolis where they were planning on taking their connecting flight to Nashville.
As a lawyer, Travis turned to the internet to find any policies about traveling with head lice. He didn’t find anything perta8ng to their situation but he found what the CDC says about children with lice at school.
“Students diagnosed with live head lice do not need to be sent home early from school; they can go home at the end of the day, be treated, and return to class after appropriate treatment has begun. Nits may persist after treatment, but successful treatment should kill crawling lice.
Head lice can be a nuisance but they have not been shown to spread disease. Personal hygiene or cleanliness in the home or school has nothing to do with getting head lice.
Both the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) advocate that “no-nit” policies should be discontinued. “No-nit” policies that require a child to be free of nits before they can return to schools should be discontinued for the following reasons:
Many nits are more than ¼ inch from the scalp. Such nits are usually not viable and very unlikely to hatch to become crawling lice, or may in fact be empty shells, also known as ‘casings’.
Nits are cemented to hair shafts and are very unlikely to be transferred successfully to other people.
The burden of unnecessary absenteeism to the students, families and communities far outweighs the risks associated with head lice.
Misdiagnosis of nits is very common during nit checks conducted by nonmedical personnel,” according to the CDC.
Kicked Off
The Travis family was told that they would not be able to go on a Delta plane until they all got treated and have a written document to prove it. They recommended them going to the emergency room.
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