12/21/2001

Battle of the Lice

When my neighbor's daughter came home from school with head lice, our son miraculously escaped the pesky critters, even though he and Ellie played together every day. Other kids in their class weren't so lucky. After hours of shampoo, housecleaning and laundering of everything in sight, the stubborn bugs returned—so often that our neighbors became local experts on getting rid of them. Save this article; your neighborhood might be next! Lice love to hide in winter caps and furry collars in lockers and coatrooms.

A Fight for Sanity in a Buggy World
By Ellen Ornato

Head lice are disgusting. They're tiny bugs that crawl from one person's scalp to another person's scalp, transmitted via shared hats, hairbrushes, toddler play and often by clothes that are hung in close proximity. They're tiny bugs that love human heads. They feed on human blood, lay miniscule eggs at or near the shaft of the hair, and reproduce more rapidly than accidentally paired gerbils in a pet shop. What's more, they're resilient to many over-the-counter treatments and nearly impossible to find on blond, fine hair.

How do I know so much about head lice? Until this past summer, my family was blissfully ignorant about this scourge. Not only did we not know what lice were, we had no reasonable expectation that we would ever have to deal with them. Especially with our clean, well-kept children.

Guess again! "Head lice are the great equalizer," says my sister, whose son had a brief brush with the bugs and was fine after a single treatment. "They like all heads just about the same and no child or adult is spared if they can get to you."

Our family's travails began in July, coinciding with our oldest daughter's first day camp experience. Her head became itchy shortly after she started there, but since she had always reacted poorly to bug bites we assumed mosquitoes at camp were biting her. She was getting bitten all right—it was just that the bugs decided to camp out rather than leaving politely after their meal!

Her itching went on for a long time. We tried shampoos for dry scalps, put lotion on her head and even sprayed bug spray into a hairbrush that we ran through her hair to try and keep the mosquitoes away. We did not, however, call our pediatrician, who would have known the source of her discomfort immediately.

In late August our family went to Martha's Vineyard, to stay with both of my sisters, their husbands and children for a week. It was there, on the beach at Menemsha with Bruce Willis clearly in view (that's another story), that we discovered the problem. We gathered around my scratching child and my brother-in-law, who teaches at an exclusive pre-school in New York City, saw the same tell-tale signs he'd seen in dozens of young children in the past few years. Head lice. No doubt about it.

We were freaked out, nauseated and more than a bit embarrassed, not to mention guilty that we hadn't checked my daughter's hair more carefully and spared her the month of itching. We got to work immediately. We bought Nix (recommended by the pharmacist), stripped and washed all the bedding, tumble dried all of the stuffed animals, vacuumed the entire house thoroughly, and then shampooed both of our children and ourselves, just in case.

Both of our children had head lice. And they shared. My husband and I got them, as did my parents, who babysat for our children just before we left for the Vineyard. My sister's family left for the Berkshires and my niece and nephew shared their buggies with those friends and then transported the bugs to Westchester County. All of the adults associated with all of these children began to itch at the mention of head lice and chose to be treated with over-the-counter remedies, even if the treatments were preventative.

Below are some pieces of advice related to the eradication of head lice, the scourge of school-age children and their families. My family is now well-versed in head lice lore and effective remedies. We share this information with you so that you might prevent the bugs from getting established in your children's head, or ours, EVER AGAIN.

• If someone tells you that head lice have been discovered at your pre-school or elementary school, DO NOT TAKE THIS INFORMATION LIGHTLY. Check your children's heads thoroughly, preferably in bright, outdoor light, on multiple occasions for at least a week.

• If you find that your child does have head lice, tell your school or day care. If you choose to keep this information to yourself, out of some misplaced sense of embarrassment or because you feel confident that you've taken care of the problem, you put your child and all the others at risk of re-infestation. After all, if you're not telling and other parents are not telling, then your school won't be checking every child to avoid its spread to other classrooms and children.

• Mature head lice are about 1/8 inch long, brown and they move very fast. You may never see one, but you'll easily see their egg cases, or nits, once you know what to look for, provided you have good vision at close range. If your vision is not excellent and you suspect head lice, go to a local drugstore and purchase a cheap pair of reading glasses at the highest magnifying level you can find. It makes a world of difference, especially with over-40 eyes.

• Nits are teeny, tiny eggs that are lain by the lice at the base of the hair shaft, close to the scalp. Before they hatch, they're brownish. After the eggs hatch, the casings are left behind and are white. Every one of these nits must be removed from your child's hair before she goes back to school. Failure to remove nits means that you're leaving egg casings, soon to be born lice, in your child's hair. You will never get rid of these bugs unless you get rid of the nits; the eggs inside the nits don't die when you use over-the-counter treatments, only the hatched ones do. Most of the time.

• Follow directions on the packages of Nix (more highly recommended than other products on the market) carefully. The most important steps are post-treatment combing and repeated treatments in 7-8 days and then AGAIN in another week. This may seem like overkill but you don't want a recurrence.

• The comb you use may determine your success. My sister took her daughter to a professional nitpicker (now we know where that word comes from) in Westchester County. According to this woman, the best comb on the market is Licemeister®, which I found at WalGreen's.

• There are a ton of home remedies, which we found out about after we had used pesticides on our children several times. The two most effective treatments we found involve either mayonnaise or olive oil. With both, the hair must be slathered to the roots with the substance and left to sit for several hours. We wrapped our heads in plastic wrap to keep the mayo from dripping and joked with our children that we were "le petit famile salade!" Following the use of the mayo or oil, the hair must be combed and combed and combed, with frequent rinsing of the comb. I honestly believe that if we had done this treatment first we would not have had the repeated problems later on. The oils loosen the nits from the hair shafts and the repeated combing gets them out.

• The shorter the hair the easier it is to find and get rid of the problem. My younger daughter now has a pixie, the result of cumulative frustration from repeated occurrences over a two-month period. My nephew voluntarily shaved his head and my niece was taken to a professional to spare her long, thick locks.

• Wash every piece of bedding, including mattress covers and comforters. Vacuum the entire house, including all the furniture and then throw away the vacuum bag. Put decorative pillows in the dryer at a high heat. Confiscate all stuffed animals and either quarantine them for TWO WEEKS in a sealed plastic bag or wash them in hot water and dry them on a high heat.

• Notify your pediatrician about the problem and ask for help and advice. There are strains of lice that have been found to be resistant to over-the-counter treatments, which must have been the case with our younger daughter (the one with the pixie haircut). To finally rid our daughter of the problem we put her on a 10-day course of antibiotics, which got into her bloodstream and killed anything that bit her.

• Kwell shampoo, which used to be sold over the counter, is now available only by prescription. It is very caustic, dries out the scalp terribly and is a serious pesticide. Our pediatrician said it is the shampoo of last resort with small children, because of concerns about toxicity. Use with caution.

• Girls with long hair should wear it up, preferably off of the back of the neck. They also need to learn that they may not share hairbrushes, under any circumstances. A friend who is a hairdresser likens this to sharing a toothbrush, and advises parents to tell their daughters about this analogy.

• Same as above, but applied to hats, scarves and any athletic head gear.

To say that our family was a bit traumatized by this learning experience is an understatement. Our younger daughter was sent home twice from pre-school, because the teachers found nits I couldn't see. Our older daughter had to go to the school nurse several times to be checked too. We've washed and re-washed everything and we're alert to the slightest signs of itching in any of us.

It was a tough way to learn a lesson about "buggies." However, as I made my way home in tears after picking my daughter up for the second time at pre-school, I had a quick reality check. In the wake of the day our world changed. This was a big inconvenience and a little problem. I took a deep breath, said a little prayer of thanks for our healthy children and our lives and went to work on our house and my daughter's hair.

Epilogue: I came in from a walk the other evening to find my husband washing comforters. Our friend had just called to tell us that he'd just discovered lice in his son's head (he caught them from a friend, not us). He was asking for advice; we were in motion. This boy and his younger brother had been at our house just three days prior and the younger child had just spent the weekend with us! Here we go again...

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