Nitty gritty of a lousy problem

Lets get down to the nitty gritty.  Head lice have been around for as long as there have been heads to get around in.  They can’t jump so they usually spread around schools kids playing together give them opportunities to crawl directly from head to head.

Treating headlice (kooties), takes time, and it important to understand your enemy.  Pharmacies stock an array of products for treatment of headlice, but some are ineffective could potentially be dangerous.

Malathion is a main ingredient in lice shampoos; it is an organophosphate parasympathomimetic – a pesticide also included in sprays for plants.  Some treatments are kept in the hair overnight.  This means the pesticides are in contact with the scalp for up to 12 hours.  Malathion comes with a with-holding period when used on crops for human consumption and strict warnings to avoid contact with skin.  Malathion has also been shown in UK studies to be only 36% effective on head lice, and less so on their eggs, probably due to the lice developing resistance. 

Malathion-resistant populations of head-lice are almost certainly present in Opotiki, which means to be effective treatments need to either increase the potency or find a chemical-free alternative. 

Adult head-lice cannot live for more than 24 hours away from a human host.  Unlike fleas they don’t drop their eggs; instead they glue them firmly onto individual hairs.  Once the egg hatches the young louse only has the energy to climb a short distance down the hair shaft, so even sliding the egg along the shaft away from the scalp will kill it.

What this means is that there is very little point in hot-washing all bedding or pillows to prevent lice from re-infecting.  Just change the pillow case, and don’t share hats or brushes.

Eggs, called ‘nits’, take 7 days to hatch.  The females take another 7 days to mature before laying eggs.  An adult female then lays about 8 eggs a day for 30 days.

The most effective method of removing head-lice and the nits is to use a nit-comb.  The metal toothed ones, called ‘lice blaster’ and available in Opotiki, are very good for this purpose and should last a lifetime. 

Research has indicated that in some cases the chemical pesticide in the head-lice treatment was less effective than the alcohol base it was in.  So here is a proven way to eliminate lice from your family: buy a cheap alcohol-based mouthwash and apply it directly to dry hair.  This is cold, and best done while sitting in a warm bath.  Wrap the head in cling-film (this is the only allowable use of cling-film in an eco-household) and leave it in for 15 mins, then rinse out.  Next, mix white vinegar with some bathwater and pour it over the hair.  Vinegar loosens the glue which binds eggs to the hair.  It can also sting if there are lots of bites on the head, so at first dilute it a lot, but less as you repeat the treatment.  Leave the vinegar in, it won’t smell when it is dry.  The last step in the bath is to put conditioner liberally through the hair.  Don’t rinse it out.  The conditioner stuns the lice that survived the mouth-wash and stops them running around.  It also helps get the comb through.

Use a regular comb to detangle the wet hair, then use the lice-comb and wipe it clean with a tissue each time.  Repeat the process every two days for at least two weeks.  A trim makes long hair easier to comb, but there is no need to shave a child’s hair off.

The big egg-laying adults go first, but you will still have to get all of the young adults before they mature, and all of the eggs as they hatch.  That means there will be two weeks when you might have juvenile lice and nits, but they cannot lay eggs, and eventually they will be gone.  If you miss a treatment then you run the risk of a louse reaching maturity and starting to lay again, which starts you back at square one.

Long after the lice are all gone the eggs which hatched may start to become visible as the hair grows, and can be removed with fingernails. If you have reached the end of this column without scratching your head you have extreme self-control indeed!  It’s a lousy topic, but an important one for the health of our community.