And you thought you were having a lousy day...

While dinosaurs are being revived to popular acclaim by the BBC, a much smaller creature, for less telegenic, is facing imminent extinction, and nobody seems to care. In fact, the news of its extermination has attracted only cheers. "Down with lice," was the Daily Telegraph's cold-hearted headline above the news that a medical break-through is about to see off the head louse. A product called Follicel, derived from the pulp of citrus fruit, was launched this week. "I used it on my 12-year-old daughter, Nicola, and it killed the lot within 10 minutes," said a Mr. Pursall from Falmouth. "We've treated about 30 children and the results have been the same." Everybody seems delighted.

But who will speak up for the hair louse?

The League Against Cruel Sports has been noticeably silent, and even the Prime Minister has failed to pay any sort of emotional tribute to The People's Lice. There has been no star-studded reception at Number 10 for a selection of distinguished head lice, nor any suggestion that it is the forces of conservatism that are behind their assassination. For centuries, no one has had a good word to say about the louse. Among human beings, the louse has been a term of abuse for well over 300 years, or 600 years in its "lousy" variant. In 1888, the extravagantly hirsute Lord Tennyson called the critic John Churton Collins " a louse upon the locks of literature", and in my 18th-century dictionary of abuse, Scotland is defined as "louse land". Over the years, the poor little louse has often been the tool of xenophobia: for a long time, the Prussians call lice Franzosen, or Frenchmen, while the French still call them espagnols, or Spaniards. "Lousy" is a veteran pejorative in America. One man who joined the California gold rush in 1849 confided o his diary that "I wish I could never hear the word 'lousy' again… It is 'lousy' this and 'lousy' that. The rain is lousy, the trail is lousy, the bacon is lousy." Yet its ubiquity did nothing to soften its offensiveness: nearly 100 years later, in 1942, the American censor banned the use of "louse" from a Hollywood movie.

Oddly enough, he went on to recommend that the term "stinkbug" be employed as an acceptable substitute. This free-and-easy use of "louse" as a term of abuse has given the poor creature a reputation that only the most concerted public relations campaign could ever hope to shake off. People with head lice feel embarrassed to an extent they would never feel with, say, a cough or a cold. Grave, warlike letters from head teachers regularly alert parents to the presence of lice in the classroom. Only the most vindictive headmaster would actually name suspect carriers, but there is always a whodunit aspect to these alerts, with parents covertly exchanging notes on which child was first seen to be scratching. The liberal ethos of the Sixties tried to remove any sense of social embarrassment from the louse carrier. "Of course, they only ever come to children with lovely clean hair," is now the accepted louse-mantra, repeated over and over again whenever two or more parents are gathered. True or false (and my 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, widely thought to be the most authoritative edition, is clear that "want of cleanliness favours their multiplication in a high degree"), it is rare for even the most unblushing parent not to react to a louse alert by reaching for the shampoo. And most of us, however matter-of-fact, find ourselves timing our visits to the chemist for our anti-louse ointments during those periods when other customers are thin on the ground. What will we think of the louse once it has gone for good?

We now happily sport dinosaur key rings, dinosaur wall charts, dinosaur wash bags and dinosaur toothbrushes, yet the dinosaur was always far more anti-social than the poor old louse. In his 1993 expose Jurassic Park, Steven Speilberg showed the dinosaur to be willful, vindictive, greedy, ugly, stupid and self-centred. But we are all suckers for nostalgia, and even though Spielberg's dinosaurs made a pest of themselves in the kitchens and gobbled up bit-part actors, they still managed to bring a warm glow to our hearts. Once Follicel has done its, worst, and the last head louse in the worked has finally dropped off its perch, we may begin to look back on head lice, too, with something approaching affection, remembering them as tremendous little characters, judging them worthy of commemoration in the form of louse duvet sets, louse pencil cases, louse bubllegum and louse bubble bath. Walt Disney, in whose oeuvre the louse, lovable or otherwise, has so far been conspicuous by its absence, will inevitably announce a brand new multi-million pound production of The Little Louse on the Prairie, about a wide-eyed louse who has lost his lousy mummy in a sandstorm, but who falls in love with a lousy princess and who, after many trials and tribulations, rediscovers his mother and marries his princess, all to the accompaniment of a stirring song with lyrics by Tim Lice. Lack of direct experience of lice may explain my sense of outrage at the triumphalism now greeting their demise. My own hair is an unsatisfactory affair, Struwelpeter-like in everything but quantity.

It enjoys the unusual property of attracting to its weirdly separated and upstanding strands a remarkable number of spiders. Whether or not spiders dine on lice I do not know, but they obviously keep them at bay. Those, like me, whose paths rarely cross with lice can still find much to admire in them. They are, quite simply, very good at what they do, which is feasting on blood and breeding. Their eggs hatch in eight days, and the baby lice are fully grown in a month. This means that one female louse can produce 5,000 descendants in just eight weeks. With their looks against them, no wings to speak of, and their horizons restricted to a series of scalps, they nevertheless make a real go of things, inserting their rostrums into the human skin and then pumping up the blood with real vigour. Follicel was discovered by accident by a doctor working on ways of getting rid or lice on salmon. Being ill- equipped to hold a comb, the salmon would have been easy prey to the begoggled louse, but it came as surprise that the treatment could work equally well on human beings.

The miracle treatment does not poison the louse; instead, so The Daily Telegraph reported, "it works by creating a membrane around the mucus in the louse's airways, so suffocating it". Call me sentimental , but even the news that the louse has mucus makes me more sympathetic towards it. Does this mean that a louse can catch a cold, or be laid low by catarrh? Though the response of some readers may be that the only thing worse than a louse is a louse sneezing, I find it hard not to be moved by these all-too-human little details. Can we learn to love our lice? It may sound fanciful, but there was a time when the Labour Party was unelectable, when John Travolta was a byword for uncool and when platform heels were considered passe. Marketing can work wonders.

All that is needed is Liam Gallagher or Sophie Rhys-Jones to be seen out with the right sort of louse, and Follicel will be forced to look to its laurels.