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.