Scott Walken

Morning, David.

How are you today?

Well, it is really, David.

It's an intensely itchy condition.

And, you know, funny enough, I think people, even as they listen to this, will probably find that they feel a little bit itchy because it's just such a visceral thing, isn't it?

It literally makes our skin crawl.

So very unpleasant, very itchy.

And it's quite contagious.

So direct hand-to-hand contact tends to cause it.

Now, shaking hands is unlikely to cause it to be passed on.

But even relatively brief contact of skin to skin for, say, five minutes will tend to cause it to be passed on.

So it's really contagious within households.

And it's interesting.

It's actually it's not the mite itself that causes the itch.

It's the body's immune system responding to the mite.

And what that means is that we can be infected with it for a number of weeks before we would start to feel itchy.

In other words, people can have it and not really know about it.

And can they pass it on at that stage?

They can.

They can.