Four times more scabies than a year ago, GGD is working on consultation hours and PCR tests

“I’ve gone completely crazy, I really don’t want to go through this experience again,” says Sam. He got scabies late last year and walked with it for a total of eleven months. “I scratched myself all the way.” Scabies, popularly called scabies, has become four times more common in less than a year. At the end of last year five people out of 100,000 were still walking around with scabies, now that percentage has risen to 20 out of 100,000. “It’s not fatal, but it’s very annoying. That means we have to do something about it,” says GGD dermatologist Henry de Vries.

This spring seemed to be the beginning of the peak. It has therefore continued and remains constant. “It’s something that’s common among students who live together in one house and have a lot of shifting intimate contacts.” Amsterdam, as a large city, is one place where this occurs most often: “If people walk by and live close together, it also occurs more often,” says the doctor.

Sam Luxembourg has been walking around with an itch for almost a year. “It was the end of winter, so I thought about dry skin. But a friend of mine also had it and it was a coincidence, because we slept in the same bed. And then I slowly realized that it probably wasn’t dry skin. skin washing.”

Then it turned out that it was scabies. Sam and his two roommates started with the standard routine: apply anti-scabies cream, wash all clothes and bedding at 60 degrees or place them in a garbage bag for three days to kill the critters. “But it kept coming back. It’s very hard to completely separate your life from your roommates, so my towel again accidentally falls on my roommate’s and there’s an immediate chance it will still exist.”

A new campaign

“The GGD takes this trend very seriously,” begins De Vries. “That’s why we will organize more consultation hours from January.” There are already consultation hours on Wednesday mornings, but the GGD will expand it so more people can come if they don’t get rid of their grievances. “We want to get more information about who has it and increase the search for sources and contacts.”

Another tool under development is the PCR test. “We know this from the corona pandemic, of course. Scabies leaves scales on the skin and we can examine those scales in a laboratory and see if they contain scabies mite DNA.” In this way it would be possible to search for the crust more accurately. It is not yet known when that test will be available for the Amsterdammer.

It would be too late for Sam, but he hopes to see this kind of development soon: “I went completely insane and paranoid when it didn’t go away.” The GGD doctor hopes he will lower the peak. “You see sometimes it suddenly decreases spontaneously. So hopefully, especially with the effort we’re planning now with the GGD, we get that curve back to the old level. Because getting rid of it completely isn’t going to work.”