Cooties game
A child is said to "catch" cooties through any form of bodily contact, proximity, or touching of an "infected" person or from a person of the opposite sex of the same age.
Are cooties contagious?
Second, cooties are both extremely common and extremely contagious. Just one brush against Jimmy, and you're definitely going to get infected. While SARS or Legionnaire's disease are contagious, they're not THAT contagious—one touch won't do you in.
What happens if you catch cooties?
But if you do get cooties from a cooter, there's a good chance they'll be crabs. Cooties was the term members of the military used in World War I to refer to the body lice that ravaged the soldiers, compounding the misery of the trenches and transmitting diseases like typhus.
