First of all, scabies is an itch that doesn't seem to ever go away. Worse than that, this extremely contagious skin irriation is the direct result of the body becoming invaded by the sarcoptes scabiei, or scabies mite.

These mites are very small, and have eight legs instead of the usual six legs like most insects. With a body size barely a third of a millimeter long, they tunnel into your skin to lay eggs, which is the reason for the massively intense itching you experience. This is an itch that does its worse at night.

These mites that do all the infesting in human skin are all female, and they can only be viewed under a microscope. They crawl but are not capable of jumping or flying. Put them in temperatures below 20 C and you can get them to stop moving around, yet they have been known to survive for quite a while at these temperatures.

There is nowhere in the world that people can go to get away from scabies. They occur everywhere, and the scabies infestation is actually a common condition. Latest estimates put scabies infestations at around 300 million reported cases every year. Yet this is not a new phenomenon, as scabies have been documented as infesting human hosts for the last 2500 years. The biggest reported cases of scabies are when epidemics happen in hospitals, long-term care locations, nursing homes, and other similar locales. US homeless people have their share of infestations of scabies, but intermittently it happens all across the board, no matter where, and no matter the income level. No one is immune once they hit.

The quickest and easiest way to find yourself in the middle of a scabies infestation is to come into direct contact with another infected person, skin on skin. The good news, if it can be called that, is that scabies will not be able to live past 24 to 36 hours in their host, no matter what kind of environment they find themselves in. Shaking hands would not be a likely method of transmittal, and just because you hang your coat in the closet of an infected person won't mean you will end up with the scabies infestation. It is even near to impossible to invite a scabies infection by borrowing bedclothes that have recently been visited by scabies mites as recently as the night before. Contact of an intimate, even sexual nature, is a different story. This is the quickest way to a scabies infestation. It is actually the most common way that the young crowd spread this infection to each other. This makes it sometimes classified as a sexually transmitted disease, although even a mother hugging her child would be enough to exchange mite infestations. However, unlike lice, children in their school environment are not together long enough for scabies mites to make their way around to each student.

This begs the question of whether a family pet, like the cat or dog, can transfer scabies mites to their owners. The short answer is no. These animals deal with a different kind of scabies mite than their human counterparts, mites that have absolutely no interest in humans. Dog scabies infestations are known as the mange. The worse an animal scabies mite can do if found on human skin is to give the human a slight itch that goes away on its own, and the mite will not survive long before it meets its demise.

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