Thankfully, unlike meningitis, cooties is 100% curable and preventable with the cooties shot. Obviously, cooties isn’t really quite like any real disease.

What happens when you get cooties?

a child’s term for an imaginary germ or disease that one can catch by touching a person who is disliked or socially avoided: The girls at camp thought the boys had cooties.

Are cooties head lice?

As a nickname for body lice or head lice, cooties first appeared in trenches slang in 1915. … The noun “cooties” was derived from a slightly earlier WWI word, “cooty,” an adjective meaning infested with lice and first recorded in 1915. The phrase “going cooty” meant getting lice and being quarantined for de-lousing.