Good Neighbors

This is a picture of Donald Rumsfeld. No, No, No, it is actually a picture of Dick Cheney. No, no, I was wrong, its a picture of a head louse. Head lice don't cause a problem. Much. Head lice are completely benign but they cause school systems to go into Red Alert Meltdown.

Recently, head lice have been very difficult to treat. They have become resistant to Rid and Nix and Kwell. They are tough little buggers.

Then there was a publication in Pediatrics, one of the flagship journals of the field. A doctor in California had a magic potion (funny, his name was Harry Potter) that you put on the lice infested head and then blow dried the hair. The lotion dried around the lice and smothered them to death. The only problem was that you had to go to Menlo Park in California to get the goodies. It was "proprietary." Until today.

CHICAGO -- Parents who paid $285 for an experimental head lice treatment for their children might be scratching their own heads, now that the doctor selling the stuff says it's really a skin cleanser available for under $10 a bottle at drug stores nationwide.

Dr. Dale Pearlman got widespread media attention and skepticism from some head lice experts last year when the journal Pediatrics published his study detailing results with a product he called Nuvo lotion. He described it as a "dry-on suffocation-based pediculocide" and the first in a new class of nontoxic lotions for head lice.

Turns out that "Nuvo" was just Cetaphil, available over the counter at most drug stores for $10.

Pearlman acknowledged that he didn't disclose the information until now "because I wanted to get rich" and had hoped pharmaceutical companies would offer him money to further develop a Cetaphil-based product for head lice. When that didn't happen, he says, he decided to write the letter.

Another guy who wants to get rich.

Anyway, this will make a lot of peoples lives easier. Trust me.

Let me remind you (one more time) that Donald Rumsfeld has already made $1,000,000 off the sale of Tamiflu to the Penatagon.