Residents of Harvard's Pennypacker Hall had to apply insecticide cream, and their personal items were fumigated when three residents of the dorm were diagnosed with scabies last weekend.

According to Lena Chen and IvyGate, word had been going around that Harvard's University Health Services had misdiagnosed the students and that they just got attacked by some especially bloodthirsty mosquitoes. If so, then the whole insecticide cream-fumigation hurrah was all for nothing.

Bostonist tried to track down information from University Health Services, and we got a response from Dr. David Rosenthal, Director of UHS. In an e-mail, Dr. Rosenthal said, "We have no evidence that it was mosquito bites. It was scabies."

That's straight from the top. Harvard students, if you feel an itch that you'd like to scratch, don't dismiss it as a bug bite just yet. Scabies may still be among you.

For more information about scabies and how disgusting they are, refer to our past post about the Pennypacker Hall Scabies Outbreak of 2007.

Image of the usual Harvard logo. This is worth repeating: Whatever you do, do not search for "scabies" in the Google Image Search. Yuck.