Family furious after being kicked off flight because of son's headlice
A family have been kicked off an international flight because one of their children had head lice.
Clay Travis said at “no point” did either he or his wife see any sign of lice before they flew from Paris to Minneapolis.
But the revelation came when their six-year-old son needed to use the bathroom and started scratching his head.
“My wife checked to see why he was scratching his head and saw then that he had lice,” he wrote on his blog Out Kick the Coverage.
“Several flight attendants rushed over too and peered down at my son’s head. ‘Oh, my God, he has lice’, they said.”
The family were then informed as they landed, by a nurse who looked “a bit like Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest” that they would not be able to take their connecting flight to Nashville.
But Mr Travis would not have a bar of it and said he could find no policy on head lice online.
“We are not staying in Minneapolis,” he said.
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He said the family was not allowed to leave the plane and Delta Airlines brought in two medical experts to “examine” his children.
After checking the temperatures of the children the family were allowed to leave the plane but were again pulled over in the customs line for another medical test.
“I said that I didn’t want to submit my six year old to a medical exam and she (the nurse) said if I refused then we were not allowed to get on our next Delta flight,”
“At that point what options did I have? So someone in gloves starts combing through my six-year-old’s hair in the middle of the customs area.”
Mr Travis said he went through customs and saw the nurse again, with another Delta employee, who informed him the boy needed to go to the emergency room and would not be allowed on the next flight.
“When I point out that only one of my sons has lice — according to the Delta examination — and that shouldn’t the rest of us — minus a parent who would be allowed to stay behind with him — at the very least be allowed to continue on our flight so that we can get our two year old and nine year old home?” he said.
“The Delta employee says that’s impossible because the entire family unit is banned from travel on his airline.”
Mr Travis said his son then broke his heart.
“My six-year-old pulled me aside and said, “It’s all my fault that we can’t go home, daddy. I’m sorry that I have lice,” he said.
“And he was nearly crying when he said it.”
He said the family incurred more than $US1000 in additional travel costs due to Delta’s decision and while he’s sympathetic to the airline’s employees said they “totally mishandled” the situation.
“I understand the desire to protect passengers, but virtually every large plane in America today has a passenger with lice. It’s just that common. And every plane flight certainly has at least one person with a communicable disease of one sort or another,” he said.
His story has since been shared from his blog more than 2,900 times.
