Busy Professional Nit-Pickers Enjoying A Lousy, Lucrative Year

NEW YORK - Though they pick nits, they are not obsessed with insignificant details.

They are professional nit-pickers, a small coterie of Orthodox Jewish women from Brooklyn who work at removing lice eggs - or nits - from the heads of infested children and their families.

It is a bizarre profession born of necessity, defying an age of medical wizardry because there is no other way to get rid of lice.

"A lot of mothers don't want to do it and would rather pay someone else," nit-picker Judy Zwick said.

The nit-pickers ply their trade for money; it has been a lucrative school year, they say. The number of cases has skyrocketed.

They say there's a new breed of lice that are all but resistant to over-the-counter shampoos.

Some health-care professionals agree with the nit-pickers, but others say the real problem is that parents don't carefully comb out the nits.

For a fee of $25 an hour, $35 if they travel to a client's home, nit-pickers will take on the problem that has parents scratching their heads.

It's painstaking work, the women say, that can take hours and often involves more than one visit and nit-picking the entire family. "It's back-breaking and a big responsibility you take upon yourself that you are going to clean out these nits," Zwick said.

The mother of seven said she began nit-picking when one of her children developed a case of lice about 10 years ago. She got so good at it that other Orthodox Jewish parents brought their children to her.

Several other Orthodox Jewish women began nit-picking, she said, and since have passed the trade on to a select few.

Until recently the dozen women worked at delousing only Orthodox Jewish families, which tend to have many children.

But this school year, with one public-school principal declaring a "record breakout" of lice in some Brooklyn schools, others have sought out the nit-pickers.

"They're calling me for the same reason," Dalia Herel said. "It used to be you used one of the shampoos and you were finished. Now the lice are very hard to deal with. They resist."

Shayna Brown, dubbed the "Queen of the Nits" by her counterparts, agreed that today's lice can outlive shampoos.

Brown recalled her worst case. "It took seven hours," she said, working on the head of a girl who had "two nits on every hair shaft. I counted 12 nits at one pull."

Though some nit-pickers insist that prospective clients first use a lice-killing shampoo, Zwick recommends cooking oil.

"You put it all over the scalp and hair and then tuck the hair under a tight, hot towel," she said. "The lice hate heat."