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Nit-Picking

News You Can Use on Lice

News You Can Use on Lice

   What four-letter word strikes fear into the hearts of parents? Lice. And if your kid hasn’t had them, chances are his best friend has, or his softball team or the kid next door who slept over last Saturday has.
   As sure as there are back-to-school sales, there will be back-to-school lice. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are 6 million to 12 million infestations of lice every year among school-age children. Having gone through several bouts of lice infestation with my son and caught them myself, I feel like somewhat of an expert.
   First of all, a few facts. Head lice have been around since (practically) the beginning of time — they were even found on ancient Egyptian mummies, according to one lice fact sheet. These human parasites are indiscriminate to socio-economic status, though they do prefer clean scalps, and they tend not to infest the heads of African Americans as often as they do other races. Lice can’t fly, jump or hop; they’re spread by close head-to-head contact, which is what usually happens when you get kids together in any kind of a group.
   Adult lice will not generally survive more than 24 hours without a blood meal, so while it’s a good idea to vacuum and change bedding (or run them in the dryer for ten minutes or put them in a plastic garbage bag for a day or two) most experts think lice aren’t easily transmitted from inanimate objects to the scalp. Nor do you have to worry about them spreading to the dog or cat or vice versa; lice want human hosts only.
   A word about nits. Sometimes used interchangeably with the word lice, nits are actually the egg casings, and they appear as a small whitish or brownish-yellow speck close to the hair shaft. Unlike dandruff or debris, nits don’t come off the hair easily. Lice look like tiny brownish seeds with legs; and, as they’re about as big as the period at the end of this sentence, they’re best observed with a magnifying glass.
   How do you know if your child has nits? Most kids will send up a red flag by scratching their heads a lot, but you can also check behind the ears or near the nape of the neck where the lice like to hang out.
   Schools have different policies when it comes to lice and nits. At my son’s school, kids are sent home for treatment if they have any live lice, but not if they have nits. At other schools, it may be that nits enough are alone to send a child home. But just this past July, the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its position on sending kids home from school stating, “Head lice are not a health hazard or a sign of poor hygiene and, in contrast to body lice [which can spread diseases like typhus] are not responsible for the spread of any disease. No healthy child should be excluded from or miss school because of head lice, and no-nit policies for return to school should be abandoned.” (Body lice, by the way, can live off human hosts for 30 days. They are spread by poor hygiene and often found in poverty-stricken cities.)
   A live louse can live on the scalp 30 days, and adult females lay three to five eggs per day, which then take seven to 10 days to hatch (not all of the nits will hatch). It takes another seven to 10 days before these nymph lice start laying eggs of their own, and so you can see, even without doing the exponential math, why lice are hard to get rid of. One single treatment won’t work. You really do have to keep checking for lice, and unless you want to pay someone every week, you have to comb and treat every seven days until there are no more nits, or lice, left in the life cycle.
   Just writing about lice makes my head itch, but here’s what works, if your child does get lice.
   First, many doctors no longer recommend the chemical lice shampoos and treatments, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deems them safe. Not only have lice have become increasingly resistant to the treatments, but also the chemical treatments don’t kill the nits, so you have to do another round in a week, and perhaps another the week after that. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of toxic chemicals that I’d prefer not to put on my child’s scalp.
   And though I tried several of the “natural” treatments — dousing the head with olive oil or mayonnaise and leaving it on for hours to “smother” the lice — I didn’t find them at all effective, nor are there any scientific studies that show they are. My son still shudders when I mention olive oil, as I tried to treat both him and myself that way the first time we had lice.
   The best treatment I’ve found by far is Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser. Six years ago, Dale Pearlman, M.D., a Menlo Park dermatologist, published a study in Pediatrics, the professional journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, that showed a 96 percent success
rate using Cetaphil. Many moms swear by it. Here’s how to use it:
Step 1: Buy a 12-ounce bottle of Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser and a clear, 8-ounce applicator bottle, available in any drugstore. Fill the applicator bottle with the cleanser.
Step 2: Drape a towel on your child and dry hair.
Step 3: Using the applicator, begin at the nape of the neck and work toward the front hairline, coating the scalp with the Cetaphil cleanser, doing small sections at a time. Repeat the process again, this time zigzagging through the scalp. Massage the cleanser into the scalp.
Step 4: Repeat step 3 you want to really soak the scalp with cleanser.
Step 5: Squirt the cleanser on the hair and massage it in as well. You should have used the entire 8-oounce bottle. If your child has long hair, fill the applicator bottle with the rest of the cleanser and repeat steps above. Leave the cleanser on for 2 minutes.
Step 6: Comb out the cleanser with a regular comb to get rid of the excess cleanser. Use a fine-toothed metal nit comb (like LiceMeister) to remove nits, going section through section, starting at the scalp and working your way around your child’s head. It helps to either use a paper towel or a white bowl filled with water to see if you’re getting any nits
Step 7: Blow-dry the hair thoroughly and leave the remaining Cetaphil on overnight.
Step 8: The next morning wash the hair with regular shampoo (or warm water mixed with vinegar, which will help loosen nits) and comb the hair again with a nit comb.
   The reason this works, according to Pearlman, is that applying the Cetaphil cleanser and the blow-drying “shrink-wraps” the lice. In one trial, Pearlman’s subjects omitted the use of a lice comb. The success rate for ridding lice was still 95 percent without the nit picking; the treatment was 97 percent effective with the comb-through.
  So you can skip the nit-picking part, though personally, I wouldn’t. I have also used Pantene conditioner following essentially the same procedure, though not leaving it on overnight.
   Not up for nit-picking? Stressed and grossed-out parents are increasingly out-sourcing the job, according to a recent New York Times article, which noted that professional nit-picking is recession-proof and fast-growing. Here in the Bay Area, I’ve gone to the Nit Pixies, who charge about $100 for a comb-through and will try to sell you a mint spray to help repel the lice. Catchers’ Nitz, by appointment only, also comes highly recommended by a mom friend.
Stopped scratching, yet?

Resources

Catchers’ Nitz
1752 Alcatraz Ave., Berkeley 94703
(510) 879-7593
www.catchersnitz.com

Nit Pixies (also in San Rafael)
5009 Woodminster Lane, Oakland
(510) 228-4336
www.nitpixies-px.rtrk.com

Dr. Dale Pearlman’s website on Cetaphil treatment
www.nuvoforheadlice.com