It’s easy to panic about head lice if you’ve never previously encountered this problem. Before you shave the heads of all your little ones or turn the house upside down with extensive cleaning, take a step back and relax.
Things to Know About Head Lice
Lice, in most cases, aren’t a health hazard since they don’t spread disease. These six-legged, tiny, parasitic bugs love the environment under a head of hair where the adults feed off the blood underneath your scalp. The female louse lays its eggs, or nits, usually within an inch from the bottom of hair strands, so the scalp’s warmth can help them grow and mature. Upon hatching, they are nymphs or juveniles, and these take about a week and a half to grow into adult lice. They’re wingless and lack strong back legs, so they can’t jump or fly. They spread by crawling, and this usually takes the form of them changing hosts while an infested person’s hair is in direct contact with that of another.
What to Do About Lice
There are about 6 to 12 million lice infestations every year in the U.S., so realize you’re not alone if this happens to any of your kids. Kids come in contact with each other fairly regularly, so chances are good they’ll eventually get a lice infestation. You can give them general advice about minimizing head-to-head contact and not using a comb or brush that doesn’t belong to them if a child recently used it with lice. That said, kids will be kids, and they’ll encounter plenty of physical contact with others, so expect that this may become an issue that you’ll need to handle.
There are lice shampoos available at drug stores that many parents have used over the years with mixed results. One of the reasons results are mixed is that they’ve been used for so many years that some lice, known as “super lice,” have developed an immunity to the ingredients in them.
Some lice’s immunity to popular toxins for killing them has caused some parents to turn to natural remedies. Most of these are at-home treatments that work by either suffocating the live lice by smothering them with olive oil or mayonnaise or by heating them to death with a dryer or
curling iron. The use of special lice combs for removing nits is recommended in conjunction with most home remedy methods.
The problem with both home remedies and off-the-shelf medicated lice shampoos are that you are on your own. You have to be extremely meticulous with a lice comb in ensuring all the nits are removed and that the heating or suffocating method killed all the live, hatched lice. If you miss just a couple of nits or lice, the infestation will start anew in a week or so. This is one reason that repeated applications of both types of treatments are highly recommended.
Head Lice Treatment That’s Natural and Guaranteed
If you don’t want to go it alone in your battle against these annoying pests, there are businesses out there whose sole reason for existence is ridding your family of head lice. For families in Mercer County, New Jersey, Lice Lifters of Mercer County is just such a company. We’re the go-to head lice treatment center in Mercer County.
When you bring any children into us that you believe may have lice, we’ll do a combing head check first thing to verify if this is the case. If our skilled, certified lice technicians spot any, we then get to work with our completely safe and all-natural mix of tools, techniques, and products that will rid your family of these unwelcome guests after a single visit. We also give you professional advice on keeping this situation from happening again, so you and your kids can stay focused on enjoying life without an itchy, irritated scalp.
