Choosing The Right Lice Comb
For those infected with lice, regardless of what treatment they are looking to use, whether it is an over-the-counter lotion, an anti-lice prescription medication, or some home remedy, it all boils down to getting rid of the nits with a good lice comb. Lice combs are not a means unto themselves; however, they complement existing treatments and get rid of nits that could possibly hatch into a new colony of lice.
The effectiveness of your current treatments are highly dependent on how good your lice comb is in sweeping off the carnage. Make no mistake, lice are pests that proliferate quicker than you can imagine, and they mate frequently to reproduce spawns. Apart from that, they have developed defense mechanisms that make them harder to eradicate.
In their one-month life span, a single female louse can produce as much as 150 nits or louse eggs. If you have about 5 fertile mated pairs on your head, it won’t be long before you have a full-on colony. With a 67% survival rate per clutch, each female louse can produce as much as 100 nymphs. If each batch of nymphs has a survival rate of 52%, the entire population of new lice from your 5 pairs of lice would be around 261. This is compounded by the fact that it only takes them a little over a week or so to mature and start reproducing. In short, if you don’t address your lice and nit problem immediately, things would only become more severe. Time is against you. You need to resolve the issue now.
The thing you have to remember is that nits are would-be lice waiting to happen and with the volume to which they are laid, there is no way you can pick them out one by one by hand. This is precisely why lice combs are met with a sense of exigency; without them, those nits cannot be fully removed.
Finding the right lice comb is the key to effectively cleaning hair off of any louse eggs left. You want your lice comb to be durable, with really long, fine and close teeth to tackle individual hairs. Look at the area between the teeth and the handle and make sure that it is compact enough not to allow lice and eggs to hide in them. Choose lice combs that are made out of metal as they are more hygienic and long-lasting. You can also sterilize them in intense heat without the fear of having them melt.
Metal lice combs are important as they can be kept clean so that they can be used till each and every lice and nit has been located and removed.
The process of removing lice is long and arduous, but it is important to be patient. Not everybody can afford to go bald and remove the problem in one go. Because people want to keep their hair, they need to go through the steps over and over again till the parasites and their eggs have been fully removed.
What Lice Tea Tree Shampoo Can Do For You
It doesn’t take a genius to know that the words “you hair” and “infestation” cannot possibly go in the same sentence without evoking some form of alarm. However, when lice occur in your head, an “infestation” is the precise way to describe it.
Tea tree oil has various applications, including pesticide properties that get rid of itchy and contagious lice problems. It’s a natural herbal solution that disinfects the surface of your scalp. In its unadulterated form, it can dissolve existing lice; however, it is too strong on the skin, it may cause burning. That is why they have imbibed tea tree oil in several products like soap, lotions, and use lice tea tree shampoo, to take advantage of its cleansing properties without irritating the skin.
Know your enemy
Head lice are parasitic insects that infest a human head. They can live for as long as a month, during which period they would have multiplied a hundred times over. Each female louse has a potential multiplying power of about 50 to 150.
Apart from being such amorous creatures, they like to travel. If you’re living with someone, chances are, he or she will have been contaminated, too. In fact, the lice problem that you have right now came from close contact to someone with a full head of it.
To survive, lice suck off blood from your scalp 4 to 5 times everyday, but not without injecting it with saliva and embedding its excretions into your head. The thought of one lice mouth attaching itself on your tender scalp is disgusting enough as it is; imagine how much more repugnant it could be with hundreds of lice sucking, excreting and copulating in your scalp.
Tea tree comes in many forms, including shampoo. Lice tea tree shampoo contains the useful qualities of tea tree oil without the skin irritation. Many say that lice are repelled by the antifungal and antibacterial properties of tea tree oil in lice tea tree shampoo. However, it is more of a preventive measure than it is a remedy. You can use this as a follow-up to an existing lice treatment, and follow it up with a lice comb. By using lice tea tree shampoo, you can decrease the risk of lice re-infesting your hair.
Many say that lice tea tree shampoos are great for putting an end to the lice re-infestation cycle by repelling the lice just as they are about to venture back in. While nothing scientific has been proven, there have been several claims to its effectiveness as lice repellent.
The other benefits that can be derived from tea tree shampoos
Because of its antiseptic properties, tea tree shampoos are good for treating dandruff and other scalp problems caused by fungal infection. Some even claim that it fuels hair growth. Tea tree shampoos effectively clean the hair, leaving it lighter, fresher and cooler. They also have a pleasant minty smell people mostly like.
Common Misconceptions About The Treatment of Lice
There are several misconceptions when it comes to the treatment of lice and lice in general. As soon as you realize that you have lice in your home, you need to take the necessary precautions and treat the problem correctly. If you don’t follow the proper procedures, you will be in for a long battle.
There are many myths that exist about the nature of head lice and how people are affected by them. No, they don’t transmit communicable diseases, and they can’t jump or fly like many people think. It’s kind of hard to fly when you don’t have wings, but they do crawl. That being said… They are still easily transmitted from one person to another. Any sort of direct contact with an infected person can lead to them being transmitted to another individual. You don’t even have to have direct contact with the infected person. All you have to do is come in contact with their combs, bedding, clothes, towels and so on. Head lice must have a host for survival since they need the warmth and they feed on the blood that they draw from the scalp. This means they typically only live for about 24 hours without a host, but with a host they can live up to 30 days. Another common misconception is that people with short hair are nearly immune and they don’t discriminate between age, race, sex or personal hygiene. The good news is they live solely on humans, so you don’t have to worry about catching them from Fido.
One thing you must be aware of when treating head lice is what has the infected person come in contact with. As soon as the infected person’s hair is treated, you need to tackle everything that the person has come in contact with. Anything that can be washed needs to be washed using hot water. Lice don’t care for that very much because temperatures above 125 degrees are lethal to them. You can accomplish the same result by putting items in the dryer for 20 minutes that you don’t want to get wet. You may not want to put your curling iron in the dryer, so what you can do with it is put in an air tight bag for two weeks. I know that’s a long time without your curling iron, but I never said this battle was going to be easy. Combs and brushes can be treated by heating them in a pot of water on the stove at 125 degrees for 10 minutes or by soaking them in a phenol solution such as Lysol for an hour. You should also thoroughly vacuum the infected person’s mattress, car interior, carpet and upholstery. It’s also recommended that the infected home is fumigated.
As long as you treat lice the proper way, you should have no problem getting rid of them and going on with your normal daily activities.
Head Lice Treatment
Pediculosis or the state of having head lice is a disease that has plagued children and some adults for centuries. It has nothing to do with a person being clean or dirty. Head lice occur because it is a highly infectious disease. While no one has exactly died of head lice, it is still a highly uncomfortable affliction and you definitely want to get head lice treatment as soon as you’re diagnosed with them.
Lice
Head lice are highly social creatures, given to spread and multiply and suck blood from its host. These parasitic arthropods feed around 5 times each day. They inject a patch of skin with saliva to prevent make sure that the blood that they suck flows with just the right consistency to satisfy their hunger.
Head lice start out as nits or eggs from which nymphs hatch. Each nit has a cap and is attached to a hair shaft. Fertile nits produce nymphs that emerge from the cap after a week (give or take). These nymphs go through three stages of molting before becoming adult lice. It takes about 10 days for new adult lice to pair off. Once this happens, the male lice and female lice mate frequently, regardless of time. It could happen at any point of the day, everyday. It’s like you’ve got parasitic honeymooners setting up camp in your scalp.
What is even more interesting is that each female louse lays around 50 to 150 nits, most of which are fertile. This means that if you were to have 10 pairs of fertile lice successfully reproducing, with each female having a 60% success rate in terms of their nits, it would mean that 1 female louse can successfully produce 90 nymphs each. Multiply this by 10, you’ve got 900 would-be lice. Using a conservative 75% survival rate for nymphs, you will have 675 full-fledged lice by the end of the molting period. At which point, those 675 will pair off. If 45% of those lice are female, and they have successfully mated with male lice, it means that around 304 female lice will produce 45,600 new nits. This could potentially produce a colony which is more than half of the population of the islands of Seychelles and around 76% of the population of the Marshall Islands.
An infectious disease
Head lice can be communicated from one person to another through contact. For instance, hugging a person with head lice and having your heads touch can cause you to have head lice, too. You can also catch pediculosis if you were to borrow a hair brush or wear a hat owned by someone with head lice.
If a family member has head lice and you share a bed, it won’t be long before you, too, are infected. You can also catch it if you rest your head on the same place that the person with pediculosis has.
Methods of lice head treatment
Because not everybody likes the idea of pesticide shampoos (especially for their children), a relatively new treatment has been introduced. Dimethicone is a kind of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) oil, which is an organic non-flammable and non-toxic silicone-like substance that is effective in smothering head lice. It blocks the air passage effectively, despite the fact that lice themselves can block their respiratory system for as long as 8 hours at any given time. It is a potent alternative to equally effective home remedies like mayonnaise, olive oil, heavy hair lotions and conditioners, which goals are pretty much the same.
What Are The Effects of Lice?
Whether you have good or bad hygienic practices you may have to deal with the effects of lice. It has nothing to do with you being clean or dirty. If anything, lice like silky, healthy and often-shampooed hair. Without the coating of dirt and other natural oils produced by the scalp, they can better latch on to their host and thrive merrily for the month that they are alive.
What are lice?
Lice are tiny oviparous parasites that attach themselves to the scalp and feed off their host’s blood for survival. Having a constant blood source can strongly affect their quality of life. With a fixed host, these parasites suck on human blood about 4 to 5 times a day to survive.
Lice believe in greatness in numbers. As such, they are constantly trying to reproduce. A female louse, for instance, can lay a maximum of 150 nits or louse eggs in her lifetime. That’s the sort of multiplying power lice have. This means if you have, say, roughly 9 fertile female lice with 9 male lice, you can expect as much as 1,350 would-be lice in your hair. So apart from the disgusting fact that you have 18 insects actively having sex on your head, you will also have the promise of 1,300 more doing the same thing and multiplying into 975,000 (granted that half of 1,300 are female). That’s around 7% greater than the population of the state of Monaco.
Are they contagious?
Apart from being highly uncomfortable and disgusting, head lice are also easy to catch. It’s not enough that they have found one host to fix themselves on; no, they want to travel. They make like explorers discovering new territories. To them, new hair is like a rich and untouched rain forest they can exploit.
What are the symptoms?
Because they feed by sucking blood with their mouth parts, they leave traces of saliva and feces behind. These things irritate the scalp and cause it to itch. They also leave bumps on the scalp, along with the nape of the neck and the area behind the ears.
What are the effects of lice?
Having head lice is itchy business, which means that you will be constantly scratching the surface of your scalp and skin, aggravating the existing irritation and causing your skin to break into a flesh wound. These flesh wounds, depending on how you treat them, can get irritated and become infected.
How does one get rid of lice?
There are many over-the-counter treatments that you can try that contain pyrethrin and permethrin. There is also pesticide shampoos designed to kill the pests. However, if you haven’t warmed up to the idea of a pesticide shampoo for your kid, you might also want to look into non-pesticide solutions and home remedies. You can use a variety of items available in your home such as olive oil, heavy hair creams, mayonnaise, etc.
How Do You Get Lice?
Lice are parasitic blood-suckers that attach themselves to human hair and reproduce at a massive rate. They have been categorized as a medical condition and are highly contagious. They can live for as long as a month, feeding off the host’s blood. Blood, of course, is the main source of their diet.
Lice start out as nits (eggs) and eventually hatch into nymphs. These nymphs turn into imagos after 3 moltings then reproduce. The thing about lice is that they copulate often, hoping to create more lice and spread through the host’s scalp. Can you imagine how gross it is to have blood-sucking insects making out in your head?
A common mistake that people make is to think that head lice are attracted to dirty hair. The truth is, it thrives in clean hair, making it easier to attach themselves. Having healthy clean scalp is perfect for the lice as there is nothing to obstruct its feeding.
Among the symptoms you can expect are severe itchiness (probably as a reaction to the lice bites and the saliva they inject into the skin to prevent the blood from coagulating while feeding). Also, if you notice red blotches on your child’s scalp, as well as the flesh behind his or her ears and the nape of his or her neck. Lice love laying their eggs behind the ear area and often collect there. Lice thrive in the darker areas of the head and can be the root of severe discomfort for its victims.
Lice are highly contagious, and are often passed on from one victim to another. You can get lice through:
1. Sharing clothing and accessories with an infected person. If you use the same cap, a hat, a shirt, or hair accessories with an infected person, you, too can get head lice.
2. House items. You can also get lice by using the same blanket, clothing, pillows, and other home item upholstery.
3. Hair-to-hair contact. While lice do not have legs great enough for jumping from one host to another, it can transfer from one head to another to direct contact.
Be sure about it
You can either take your child to a specialist, or you can go through your child’s hair yourself. Use a lice comb and glean through each strand. If you notice any nits or if you see actual lice crawling around, it’s time to take your child to a physician. You should also get everybody in the house checked. Lice can be catching. Even you could have been infected simply by going about your daily routine and touching on things that may or may not be contaminated.
Get the house cleaned
To make sure that lice don’t spread in your home, you’d better get it cleaned. There are many places in the house where lice can hide like pillows, blankets, beds, the couch, clothes, hair clips or scrungies, old brushes or combs, hats, scarves, chairs (particularly, the head rests), and so on.
Denorex Lice Treatment
Head lice or pediculosis is a pain to have. It’s an itchy, uncomfortable and embarrassing ordeal. For children, it’s frustrating and annoying. For single people, it’s the best way to secure your current marital status for a long time. People will view you as contagious and disgusting. While the occurrence of head lice has nothing whatsoever to do with hygiene, there’s still that psychological implication that you’re dirty. There good thing is there are easy treatments out there such as Denorex which kills lice, but first let’s answer some common questions.
What are lice?
Head lice (otherwise known as Pediculosis Humanus Capitis) are tiny invertebrate parasites with vampiric natures and the libido of bonobos. They infest human heads by attaching themselves onto the hair strands. They pierce the human scalp with their mouths and inject chemicals through their saliva to ensure good texture for the blood that they are sucking out. Their excretions *during (*yes, during and not after) feeding are embedded into the human scalp. All these irritate the human scalp and skin, causing redness and blotches; in some cases, even infection.
Head lice hatch from fertile nits. It takes them about a week or more to hatch into the nymphal stages. Each louse goes through 3 nymphal junctures before developing into an imago or an adult louse. By then, they would go through a pairing process. Once they have marked a mate, they would copulate frequently for the entire span of their lives (mostly a month).
Each female louse has a multiplying power of about 90, give or take, laying 150 nits or eggs in her entire career, with 60% of them being fertile. A couple of them can transform the human head into a thriving (albeit, repulsive) ecosystem. A group of them can proliferate in the same manner as the people of large civilizations have. Some of them would even make like Christopher Columbus and venture out into new worlds; specifically, new human heads to infest and colonize. For the one month that they are alive, they can spawn many more to take their place.
Why do people get lice?
Because it is a contagious disease, it can be transferred through contact. For example, if you borrowed a comb from a friend whom you didn’t know had head lice (in fairness, at that point, your friend probably didn’t know he or she had lice, either), the chances of you getting head lice is 99.99%. Likewise, if you were to share a bed with someone who has pediculosis (let’s say you hooked up with a really good-looking person whom you didn’t know had the beginnings of a lice colony), you are going to get infected, too.
On top of being highly amorous creatures, head lice are adventurous and they like to travel. They also like to reproduce. No matter how clean you are, if you come into direct contact with someone who has head lice, you’ll probably get it, too.
What is Denorex?
Denorex is a shampoo product that is highly effective in improving the condition of the hair and scalp, and getting rid of dandruff.
How does Denorex remove lice?
Denorex Extra Strength Anti-Dandruff shampoo has certain ingredients that help battle lice. Lather up your hair with Denorex and wrap it in saran wrap. Leave it on for 30 minutes if you’re an adult, and 10 minutes, for children. It would also do well to lather the skin surrounding your hair line with moisturizer to prevent it from drying out or getting irritated. Rinse thoroughly and comb-out with a fine-toothed metal lice comb. Repeat as necessary.
Most Popular Methods For Getting Rid of Lice
If your child keeps on scratching his or her scalp, or if you notice red welts starting from the scalp going towards the nape of the neck, then your child might have head lice, and you’re going to want to know the most popular methods for getting rid of lice.
To properly determine whether you child has head lice infestation, thoroughly inspect each and every section of your child’s hair using a louse comb. Remember that it won’t do you any good to be infected as well so make sure that you are wearing gloves and that your own hair is covered properly with cling wrap. Also, make sure to do the inspection in an area that is not too windy.
If you find a plump nit (similar to a sesame seed), there’s a chance of an infestation and may require some medical treatment. However, finding nit husks are easier to handle and can be addressed with certain home treatments. Once you find out that your child has lice, you have to the whole family inspected, as well.
There are many ways of dealing with pesky lice.
Over the counter medications
There are a number of things you can buy from the pharmacy to get rid of head lice. For instance, there are pesticide shampoos and anti-lice hair lotions or creams. These things have permethrin and pyrethrin—ingredients that actively stop lice from reproducing by killing them. These are generally safe to use for children no younger than 2 years old. However, it is important to test for allergies before using any product, especially something that contains chemicals like these. Also, never use the product until you are certain that your child has lice.
Home remedies
There are things that you can use at home like heavy hair creams, olive oil, and rich, thick hair conditioners. Some would even use mayonnaise; however, the same effect could be derived from olive oil, which is viewed as the most effective of all the mentioned options.
Get a good lice comb
Key to getting these unpleasant critters off your child’s hair is a good lice comb. Choose something with finer teeth that’s good for going through the hair at length, picking up nits and lice along the way.
Check your entire family for lice
Lice is a bad and itchy business that’s catchy; particularly, within families since there is a greater amount of contact when it comes to sheets, clothes, furniture, towels, and so on. To make sure you’re running a lice-free household, get everybody checked. It might interest you to know that a female louse can lay as much as 150 eggs in her lifetime. That’s just one. Imagine what a group of lice can produce.
Sanitize your home environment
The funny thing about lice is that it’s not really as attracted to dirty hair as it is to clean, silky hair, which could be a problem for your family, as it is certain that all of you have clean hair. Get rid of dirt and anything that could pass on lice from one head to another.
Home Remedies to Cure Head Lice
If your child’s scalp is unusually itchy, so much so that he or she has red welts going all the way to the nape of his or her neck, or you find drop-like specks on the strands of your child’s hair, chances are, you have an infestation.
While it is recommended that you see a physician to get the right anti-lice treatment, there are also a number of home remedies that you could employ.
Note that before you undergo any home remedies for lice removal, you have to be sure that the white flecks you find in your child’s hair are nits and not dandruff. Key to spotting the difference is that dandruff normally originates from the scalp; whereas nits are attached to the hair strand with its hair shaft.
Also, determine the severity of the case. If you see actual lice moving around your child’s scalp, then you would want to get medical treatment and not just home remedies.
However, if all you are seeing are empty nits, there are a number of things you can do using some of the things you have handy.
Suffocate the buggers
You can smother them by applying a generous amount of mayonnaise on your child’s hair and covering it with cling wrap. If the idea of putting smelly mayo on your kid’s hair doesn’t appeal to you, there are other alternatives:
1. Olive oil or baby oil
2. Heavy henna hair cream
3. Hair conditioners
Follow the same process as you would using mayonnaise. Of all the mentioned alternatives, many like olive oil the best as it softens (in some cases, melts) the shell of the lice, making them even more vulnerable.
Use herbal remedies
Certain essential oils and tea tree oils have been used for removing lice; unfortunately, the effectiveness of this method remains obscure. It is also not recommended for very young kids as it may irritate their skin and scalp. Usually, some allergy testing is required. However, herbal remedies are better used on older children.
Over the counter
If you have 5% Benzyl Alcohol Lotion handy in your medicine cabinet, you can use it on your child, provided that he or she is older than 6 months, and that he or she is not allergic to it. It’s an effective way to kill lice by crippling their respiratory track.
Before using it on your kid, do a simple allergy test. Once it turns out that he or she is not allergic, apply the 5% Benzyl Alcohol Lotion thoroughly on hair, making sure each strand is covered. Leave the lotion on for 10 minutes. Clean hair using a lice comb. Rinse thoroughly and repeat the entire process after a week.
Head lice shampoo
Having head lice shampoo ready at home can definitely be a boon as it serves as a good way to finish off any anti-lice treatment that you have. It’s a good way to control lice infestation, and it’s easy to use.
Curing Head Lice With Mayonnaise
Out of the many home remedies for head lice, the Mayonnaise Lice Killing Method is the most popular of all. A lot of people would easily dismiss this as a myth, but the fact remains that mayonnaise contains components that are effective at removing head lice; namely, oil and fat. Its thick texture has the ability to smother head lice till it can no longer breathe, rendering it dead.
If you’ve been given the task to treat someone with head lice using mayonnaise, take the proper precautions.
1. Tie your hair in a bun and wear a disposable shower cap.
2. Wear disposable surgical gloves.
3. Have about 2 cups of mayonnaise (or more) in a disposable container. One way to determine just how much mayo you will need is by assessing the quality and thickness of the infected person’s hair. The thicker the hair, obviously, the more mayo you will need.
4. Prepare saran wrap to wrap around the infected head.
5. Be ready with a lice comb.
6. Line your work area with newspaper or any other sturdy paper that you can throw away afterwards.
7. Make sure that you turn off all electric fans or anything that would make the room windy.
For the actual treatment, here are the things you have to do:
1. Apply a generous amount of mayonnaise all over the infected person’s hair. The amount of mayo to be used here, as mentioned earlier, will depend on the density of the hair. The more hair the person has, the more mayo you will require. Remember that you are trying to suffocate the head lice, and you are not going to effectively do that by not having a huge amount of mayonnaise handy.
2. Tightly cover the infected person’s head with saran wrap. The idea is that it should be tight, so as to properly smother the head lice and block the passage of air. Shower caps are all right, but not often recommended because they do tend to be loose.
3. Leave the hair to soak in mayo for at least a couple of hours or more. Ideally, it would be better to leave the mayo on your hair for longer than 2 hours, just to be sure that there aren’t any survivors.
4. Comb out lice and nits from your hair using a fresh lice comb. Tap the comb on the disposable lining to get rid of the gunk on the teeth every time you run it through the hair. Remove what you can at the first stage. Throw the old lining out and put down another batch of lining.
5. Shampoo hair and rinse thoroughly under high water pressure. Make sure you get rid of every bit of mayonnaise. It is recommended to use an anti-lice shampoo to get the full effect of this home remedy.
6. Comb out lice and nits the second time. Use your gloved fingers to pull out the stubborn ones. Be really thorough. You don’t want to leave any behind.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 till you are fully satisfied. It’s better to be sure about these things.
At the end of the treatment, get rid of all the tools you have used, from your shower cap, to your surgical gloves, to your lice comb, to the disposable lining.
