How to Get Rid of Head Lice

How to Get Rid of Head Lice Head lice are a fairly common insect infestation. The lice cannot jump fly or swim, so they must be transferred by close physical contact, including nut not limited to hat swapping. The lice live on the scalp, and sometimes can be found on or under the eyebrows.

The lice lay their eggs on the hair shafts and the eggs are stuck to the shafts with a fairly strong natural glue that the lice excrete. Over the years there have been preparations that kill the lice, but that cannot penetrate the glue and shell of the egg. The consequence of this treatment is that it used to be necessary to repeat treatments in several cycles timed to the hatching times of the young lice. If you are using one of these preparations, the timing of treatments is critical; if you are a day late, you may already have a new batch of eggs on the hair shafts.

Virtually all of the currently available as well as the traditional treatments recommend that you thoroughly comb out the hair after treatment. The combing is to remove both the dead lice from the scalp and to remove as many lice eggs from the shafts as possible.

The lice eggs are called nits, and from this and the tedious job of searching each hair shaft to remove the last nit, comes the usage of the term nit-picker to refer to someone who is overly careful of details.

The older methods may have been fairly effective at killing the head lice, but due to the requirement not to miss a single nit and the fact that many lice infestations occur among young children and toddlers, re-infestations, even after careful cleaning have been common.

Today’s remedies seem to be more effective at removing the nits and at killing the live lice, and yet this does not reduce the need to watch for new infestations from the other children in the play group or classroom. In some schools, when the school nurse finds a single student with head lice the entire student body is sent home with parental notification asking the parents to treat their children for head lice.

A fairly quick and easy way to get rid of head lice in a single treatment which used to be banned from schools and may still be banned from some is shaving the infected head bald. While this was once socially unacceptable, it is more common now to see children wearing bald as a hair style. Since shaving a head bald removes both the live insects and the nits, along with the hairs to which they are stuck, it is easily the one sure fire way to remove all head lice and nits in a single treatment. It will also eliminate the re-infestation which is still likely with any other treatment if the child goes back to the same play group or school where they first became infested. If you can get away with it, shaving the head is a cost effective and efficient treatment of head lice.

Shaving also avoids harsh chemical products, which used to be common in head lice preparations. Today you can also choose from a large selection of preparations which are advertised on the web, although, the watchword for any web purchase is caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.”

I hope this helped you finding a way to get rid of head lice. To learn more about how to get rid of a lot of problems in your daily life , kindly visit us at : http://www.howtohow.com . You will find a lot of valuable Information there.