Lice Check In But They Don’t Check Out: Summer Camp Head Checks

Anyone who has had a kid go to summer camp knows the danger of bringing home more than dirty laundry.  One kid with head lice checking into a bunk of 9 other kids is like the Typhoid Mary of Insects. It is a rare child that can avoid infestation in a small space for 6 weeks. We’ve seen camp directors who have dealt with every aspect of childhood and teen drama get the same look on their face as Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” The horror. The horror.

So, what can you do to make sure this does not happen to your kid? Or at least give them a fighting chance?

Ask your camp to bring in a professional at check in and check out. Many camps have staff and campers from all over the world. One head transporting lice can reek havoc. We usually find somewhere around 10% of the population coming in with head lice, sometimes more with all girls camps, sometimes a lot less with all boys (less hair).  If lice is discovered, they are dealt with before they can become an infestation. The lice professionals then follow up to make sure the problem is in check and summer can commence in  peace.

Have the kids checked for lice previous to going to camp if there aren’t lice professionals doing the check in.  Occasionally you come across an amazing camp nurse who can spot a nit across the dining hall but sometimes they just aren’t experienced. We are. Better to have them going in clean with a shot at keeping it that way.

Send them to camp with lice preventative products. You can buy all the lice  shampoos and conditioners and oils and preventative gee-gaws in the world but unless the child is bald or made of plastic, smelling bad to a louse will only get you so far. However, it is something in your favor and way better than doing nothing.

Tell the camp nurse if your child has had a recent infestation even if they have been treated. Lice treatment shampoos are unreliable, particularly against resistant very prevalent “super lice.” A couple of missed eggs and the camp will be crawling with lice in a matter of weeks. It can’t hurt. It can only help.

Send them to camp with a good quality lice comb.  Have the kids run a wide tooth comb followed by the lice comb  quickly through every section of hair on their head every week or two.  This could stop a louse at the gate or at least keep it from turning into an infestation before they get home.  We always recommend the Nit Free Terminator  Lice Comb which we sell at our treatment center.

Make pony tails mandatory (Better yet, cut it off!)  Look, we know how the girls like to keep their hair long but  hair that is bound is that much harder for a louse to get to because the insect needs to grab onto something to climb up to the scalp. Plus if they do get it in their bunk, it is sooooo much harder to spot a problem and deal with long hair, especially if untrimmed.

Emphasize the importance of not sharing.  Hats, brushes, hair accessories or pillows.  Try to keep their heads off of the other camper’s bunks. Or…..especially with the younger girls…..each other’s heads.  Lice do not jump. They don’t fly. They run.  They need a bridge to the head. Even in a bunk full of heads with lice.

Do not rely on lice treatment shampoos if lice are discovered on your child at camp. Remember those previously mentioned “super lice” ? They are resistant to traditional lice treatment shampoos. Eggs get missed. Get the kid to a local professional or it can turn into false sense of security followed by giant regret.

Check their heads as soon as they are home, preferably by a professional.  Do it while their laundry is still contained and they have not mingled with other people in the family. This way if you do discover little hitch hikers, your clean up will be minimal.  We can treat most camper’s heads with our hot air flow treatment technique using the Airalle device in about an hour and a half.  Don’t let the summer camp’s lice issue become your entire family’s problem.

We would be stunned if we found a summer camp that did not have some kind of lice experience. Sometimes its good to know what you are up against because a little proactive can go a long way. And, in the end, if you are in the Boston area, you can always call us for a professional set of eyes to make sure you don’t have any extra campers on your kid’s heads. This is what we do.

Have a great summer!

www.liceaunties.com

 

 

 

Lice Enablers

My friend’s kid goes to a school with a fair amount of parents who use alternative everything to deal with inconveniences life  introduces to them. This is why when her daughter contracted head lice yet again she said, “Ah! So that kid WAS loaded in tea tree oil. I just knew she was hiding it. I smelled it.”

Her daughter has very thick wavy light brown hair…a veritable lice nirvana…and this is not her first lice rodeo. She caught this one at the gate because she is diligent with her head checks. Still, it had advanced enough to be in the nymph stage. In another week she would have had a healthy population of new adults reproducing like, well, lice. Hopefully, the other parents in the class  had been doing the same. Because, thanks to one parent who told their child that it was something that needed to be hidden, the other parents didn’t know that the infestation had begun.

My friend will report what she found to the school. She knows that it could come back round again if everyone in the room doesn’t take precautions. The other kids will get a note saying to be on the look out because that is the school policy (not all do). Her child won’t feel bad about it because she knows that she didn’t do anything wrong. She isn’t dirty. It can happen to anyone if they have head to head contact.

She is frustrated because if she been made aware of that her kid was exposed, she could have combed her out immediately. Not giving the insect a chance to get to the nymph stage. Not having to haul all of the linens and clothing to the laundromat because she lives in a city and does not own a washer and dryer. Not having to call all of the play dates from in between the time she contracted it and now.

We get cases like this all of the time at Lice Aunties Newton. Someone in a class or a camp or a daycare felt too shamed to report an infestation, usually because they had treated them and thought it was a done deal. They trusted a treatment shampoo and thought they got them all, not realizing that “super lice” have developed a resistance to the chemicals in many of them. Or maybe the nits (eggs) got missed in the whatever process they chose  to use. Or the lice population had grown enough to spread the love before they treated the child. Any number of scenarios. All of them ending with some unsuspecting other family being exposed without warning.

My friend knows that it isn’t the end of the world. Her kid doesn’t feel humiliated, just inconvenienced. That it is the lice causing the lice although people hiding them don’t help. I wish everyone could figure that out.

 

 

 

 

Can Selfies Cause Head Lice And Other Boogiemen

Recently, a question was raised to the Lice Aunties regarding the role of selfie photos and their role in the spread of a lice infestation. After all, the easiest way to get head lice is via head to head contact and a selfie usually requires head to head contact. Can a person get head lice from participating in a selfie? Let’s look at the facts:

• Head lice locate another host head using hair as vehicle to get to the food source aka the blood under the scalp. They have to crawl. They cannot fly or jump.
• Head lice cannot survive being away from their food source for much more than a day, maybe two.
• A newer infestation does not have a large amount of adult head lice. The immature lice (a.k.a “nymphs”) do not normally venture away from the food source.
• Head lice  prefer the warmth of the scalp.
• Occasionally, a louse may fall onto a piece of clothing. This would most likely take place during an advanced state of  infestation when the proverbial house is crowded.
• Cell phones are made of materials that a louse cannot grasp.

Given these facts, if two people put their heads together to take a selfie, is it possible for a head louse to see the opportunity and then run fast enough to transfer from head to head? Possibly but not likely.  That would have to be a really fast louse and it would probably have to be positioned in a convenient location away from the scalp. It can’t transfer to the head via the cellphone unless it is an absolute freak of nature. The likelihood of an adult louse wandering away from the food source is not unheard of but they do prefer to stay warm near their food source until the situation warrants it.  And it is far more likely to happen when there is a case that is advanced with a population of adults on the head that is aggravating its host (i.e. beware of  itching people).

So, can it happen? Yes. You can also get one from leaning onto the same chair a person has just vacated in a waiting room and a ton of other ways warranted via really bad luck. Is it likely? In our unscientifically proven, hands-on experienced opinion, not any more than a whole lot of other ways with really low odds. Which explains why we see way more 6 year old girls who like to play head to head with a bunch of other 6 year old girls (and their older sisters) then we see, well, everyone else in the population taking selfies.

For more real facts and helpful information, check out our website at www.liceaunties.com

Lice Aunties Newton Are In The Boston Herald!

Wondering what our salon is like? We are so excited to be featured in this great piece in The Boston Herald’s business section written by the wonderful Katie Eastman that will tell you just that. It even includes some great video of the ladies of Lice Aunties at work, emphasizing how comfortable and relaxing an experience that started out so badly can be!

Attached is the youtube link to just the video…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5_vNbqRYdI

And here is the article….

http://bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2014/02/lice_aunties_sees_jump_in_clientele

Step Away From The Lice

Before we opened our treatment center, we used to do treatments in the homes of our clients. There was occasionally a client so freaked out that no matter what I would say, they would scrub or vacuum or throw out every surface that a louse could possibly have been within contact in the most convoluted of circumstance, sometimes giving them super powers in the process. I knew the biological limitations of the insect and would give the information but if I tried to stop them for carrying out their process of cleaning up, they would just worry that it was wrong. It made them feel better to do it.

The reactions of our clients vary.  We are all creatures of our environment and experiences. Sometimes people were punished for contracting head lice in their past when they were kids making  having them in their home is a personal affront. Some clients had treated their children with different methods that didn’t work and had finally conceded that the time and money invested accumulated to more than one shot of guaranteed work with us.  Sometimes whole families were infested. Sometimes there was an extreme amount of dense hair, making the scalp aka head lice ground zero nearly impossible to an untrained person. Sometimes the person lived alone and couldn’t comb out themselves reliably.  Others were repeat customers. Others saw it as a plain old nuisance not much worse than a cold and wanted to move on with their lives as fast as possible. And others cried. Exhausted. Irritated. Deeply offended. Humiliated.

There is something about moving away from the home and being treated in a safe environment, stepping out of the chaos that erupts and being told that no matter what, we will take care of you. That if for some reason the minute chance that the treatment is not 100% effective, we have your back. You can come to this clean place and we eliminate any physical possibility that we can fathom that you will transport the lice back to your home. You can come back and have us look again after you have been treated to make you feel better.

We opened this center over a year ago and I don’t think that even we grasped the idea that it could often be a place filled with laughter. On some days it takes on the feel of a support meeting for the lice inflicted to compare notes. Most people don’t intend to socialize. They bring their headphones. We provide wifi.  Often they worry about being discovered by a neighbor there and then they realize if the neighbor is there, they have lice too. But again and again, they realize that they are so relieved to be freed from the tyranny of head lice infestation and they finally can just relax.  We don’t give you tons of after care (follow up quick comb outs and head checks at home). Come back if we treated you and you are still worried. It takes ten minutes to double check. We send you home ready to deal with minimal clean up, armed with facts, not fear.

If you still want to scrub your house from ceiling to floor, well…you get a really clean house so it won’t hurt.  But either way, you will come home clean and good to finish it. It is no longer a huge mountain to climb and the lice are about to be a thing of the past.

Lice Math (or Why 2 Weeks in a Plastic Bag Doesn’t Make Sense)

There aren’t a whole lot of positive things that you can say about head lice but at least they are consistent.  You won’t find a louse heading out on its own willy nilly. Head lice are insects just doing their jobs like ants and bees but not as cute. They need to eat. They need to reproduce. That’s all.

This is how they work. An impregnated female is looking for a fresh head away from the relatives and jumps ship (other head) via a very sophisticated sense of smell. Or a couple of lice love birds have both smelled a delicious new food source (aka human scalp), met on the new turf, made sweet lice love  and now Mama Louse is carting around a whole lot of reproductive matter to continuously create fertilized eggs that ,in turn, will need to be deposited in 3 to 5 nits daily increments throughout the head, close to the skin so that the babies will be able to feed immediately.  Mama Louse continues to drop eggs, eventually the babies have babies and infestation is born.

Now, let’s look at some lice facts:

• The newly deposited eggs will take between 7 to 10 days to hatch into new young lice (aka nymphs).
• It will take another 9 to 12 days for them to develop into reproducing mature adults.
• Lice rarely live off the human head for more than 48 hours.
• The life span of a louse is about a month.

So, looking at these statistics above us, here are some of the assumptions we can make:

If you/yours have been exposed and you suspect there is a new bug on a head, if you continuously and thoroughly check for what we call at Lice Aunties “evidence” aka eggs and there is a viable female on the head that is laying eggs (3 to 5 a day), by the time that first batch of eggs are hatched (7 to 10 days) there should be enough “evidence” (21 to 50 eggs) to confirm infestation.

Say you find a nit. Or five nits. But not a lot and you have looked at all of the hair near the scalp from every angle you can fathom? This means that either it is a brand new infestation or possibly something happened to the adult and it has ceased laying eggs. We suggest getting a really really good lice comb….we recommend the Nit Free Terminator comb because it has long tines that are tightly spaced and ridged…..and start combing out with lots of conditioner to provide a contrast to see what you are combing (for more  instruction details see our section on combing at  http://www.liceaunties.com/resources-instructions-for-removing-head-lice-and-nits.php). And keep checking.  This is not an infestation (although I do suggest checking the whole human population of the house because that may not be the case with everyone). If the louse is not allowed to reproduce into more lice, its just an annoying bug.

But what if you hit the jackpot (or the not-jackpot?)? Insects cavorting on your head in multiples? Bugs having a veritable pediculosis conference on a scalp in your home?  In your mind, you imagine weeks of cleaning up, humiliating phone calls, expensive treatments that you don’t trust, olive oil on all of your furniture, and, after it is all done, you know that you can’t trust it not to be really and truly gone.  Calm the @#%& down. Breathe.

This is where paranoia can really mess a soul up. It is a nuisance that is probably far less complicated than in your head. Remember the math. If you get rid of the nits and the insects on the head, the adult lice…..the only part of the nit/nymph/adult triumphant that will infest another person…..can normally only live off the human head for 2 days max. Maybe you get a super freak that can live 3 days. That’s all.

Treat the head. We do not recommend the pesticide  based shampoos used most commonly because the super lice of this generation has developed a resistance to many of the chemicals in them and do not kill the eggs effectively. Also the combs that come with them tend to be really crappy. Our company uses a three part treatment based around a heated air flow device called the AirAlle. The whole thing usually takes about an hour and a half (unless it is a really severe case), guaranteed. The head part of the infestation is eradicated and now you get to take care of the rest of the stuff.

Get your family checked if you haven’t already. Err on the side of caution. Comb them out briefly whether you find something or not.

Remember the whole 2 days off of the head thing? Just the adults can re-infest? So think about where a louse would hang out ff the body if there is one. They don’t like hard surfaces. If they are on anything, it will be where a human head had been near. Vacuum the cloth covered furniture or throw a sheet over it for 3 days. Unless you have toddlers rolling around on the floor, how is a louse going to get to a head? Vacuum if it makes you feel better but the likelihood is pretty slim that a louse can smell your head from down there and run up to your scalp. They can’t take dehydration so anything that can fit in the dryer on high heat will be dead in 20 minutes. Stick them in a dryer for 30 to make yourself feel better.  See? Nothing crazy here. You don’t have to worry about them lurking behind the toilet tank or waiting to get you from the tile kitchen floor.

You probably will google head lice until carpal tunnel syndrome sets in.  Lice’ll do that to a brain. You will often see in clean up advice that suggestion to  put your belongings in a plastic bag for around two weeks especially in school websites. Do the math. How long do lice actually live off the human head? 2 days. Right? We can’t figure out why they still say that either. We strongly suspect it is from not wanting to have to do it all over again if you get a re-infestation from getting rid of them with weak methods initially.  Truth is, if you didn’t do a thing and left your house for three days, they would all be dead, plastic bag or no plastic bag. Throwing them in a room and shutting the door for more than 48 hours will do the trick too. The plastic bag isn’t magic.

So you see, if you look at the lice enemy as a creature of limited, specific means and treat them within those confines, it will seem much less overwhelming. Do the math.

Fear: A Louse’s Best Weapon

Sometimes you would think a person found the creature from “Alien” living on their scalp.  Or a tiny zombie that is going to infect all of the other heads so it must be kept a secret so that people will not reject their humanity.  Truth is, I might have  acted that way a couple of years ago, too. Now I know the limitations of my enemy so I am not really afraid of them.  And I am up to my armpits in them  sometimes.

A louse has two forms of survival defense, mechanical and psychological.

The lice know how to smell/locate a head, run really fast and hide. That is it for  the mechanical part.

The psychological part is via the victim. I doubt that the head lice know about this. They aren’t that bright. And it is probably better this way because the psychological part? Fear? It is their most powerful weapon. It keeps the human from accessing the situation correctly, sometimes denying their existence until there are many generations of head lice on one scalp. It creates an atmosphere in which humans withhold information from each other, enabling infestation among the others that they come into contact with (potentially creating a cycle when those infested can re-infest the original head). It also can occasionally produce a state of such paranoia and irrational behavior  that it turns an otherwise organized, peaceful home into a den of misery replete with raw over-processed scalps.

Lice are inconvenient. They don’t kill. They don’t cause major diseases. They cannot fly, jump or use a transporter. The adults can only live off the human head 48 hours (we say 3 days for extra insurance). The eggs and newly hatched nymphs cannot survive off of the human head at all. Your dog cannot give you head lice. They do not roam your house at night plotting your demise. They just want a meal and to make more lice .  That is all.

Know that you can get rid of them with a decent lice comb (we like the The Nit Free Terminator Lice comb), elbow grease, cheap conditioner (http://www.liceaunties.com/resources-instructions-for-removing-head-lice-and-nits.php  ) and a lot of patience. Or, if you are in  Massachusetts, come to us and we’ll send treat you with the LouseBuster™   hot air-flow treatment and send you home usually within two hours with a lice-free head and instructions on how to do light, preventative clean up.*

I would say don’t let the lice win but the lice don’t know that they are in a competition. It makes more sense to say stop getting freaked out by them because it isn’t going to make them any less powerful by expending unnecessary energy.  Access the situation, approach it logically and make them go away so you can get on with life.

*If you don’t live in the Massachusetts area, you can find a LouseBuster(tm) treatment provider in your area at http://www.lousebuster.com.

For more information please go to www.liceaunties.com

Original image at top of page by espos.de

This not that. Or that. This. OR Spotting Lice Eggs aka Nits

It took me a while to figure it out. It’s amazing the amount of types of debris that can be found on a human head. We’ve killed thousands of nits and still get surprised sometimes (glitter, fingernail clippings, cookie pieces, etc). But it can be done.  You can learn to tell the difference from lice egg and a potato chip crumb too.

Nits can be very tricky to spot when the insect is new to the head and there isn’t much to see yet. So if at first you don’t succeed, try again tomorrow instead of saying “Well, I checked.  That’s it.” They have an incubation phase of about  7 to 10 days. The female lays around 3 to 5 eggs at a pop. Remember that you have a couple of days before they hatch and are populating your head with real crawling bloodsucking head lice. Better to be absolutely sure that they aren’t there and get them and their mother beast before they cause an infestation.

Like so many things in life, lice eggs are not all the same. They tend to blend up against the follicle and that hair follicle can vary in color, as do the eggs. So don’t count on them looking exactly like the pictures that you have googled (although you can admire the moxy of the photographer willing to get that close to a louse ridden head). Diversity is the spice of lice.

Sorry about that. I digress….

Look for bumps on the hair shaft anywhere from next to the scalp to about an inch from the root of the hair follicle, then run your fingers over it. To me, it feels like the hair has a tiny, oval wart that it is part of the shaft, like a bump on a twig. I always try to show my clients how they feel to the touch. You can’t always count on good light but if you are unsure of the validity of your lice egg assumption, nothing  on a hair follicle that I have found yet that feels the same.

The nit is attached on one side of the strand with its own special egg glue. It can’t be moved without effort, usually pinching it with your fingernails and pulling it off. There is a good chance that the nit that is discovered past the 1/2  inch area is either old and dead or doomed as a useful cog in the lousy life cycle. Generally, it has to be close enough to the head for the newly hatched nymph to get to an immediate food source (I know. Ew.).  But we have seen way too many anomalies along this line to deem this as a certainty.  Hedge your bets. Treat is as if the nits are alive.  Caution goes a long way in lice hunting.

Here’s what they don’t look like. Dandruff. Sand. Cradle Cap. Sebaceous oil deposits. Paper. Mulch.

Dandruff moves when coerced. Sometimes if you scratch the area  on a dry scalp where there is a considerable amount of white debris, you can produce a little more. The hardest cases are the ones when you have an abundance of debris from dandruff because it becomes a  needle in the haystack scenario. This is when the whole touch thing really helps. Go slowly, look at each area closely and grab onto the suspicious characters. Don’t be afraid to yank it out for closer examination.

To me, sand resembles nits the most. If the person has been at the beach or a playground with a sandbox, approach with caution. Sweaty heads can make the little so-and-so’s stick but if you pull at it, it should slide off easily. Also, you will probably find more farther down the hair shaft where it just doesn’t make sense for a louse to lay multiple eggs. Still unsure? Try giving the head a good scrub with a liberal amount of shampoo and look again on a clean dry head. Nits don’t wash out easily, if at all.

Mulch is black and sharp. An obvious no upon examination. Paper flakes have sharper edges and are usually lighter. Also an easy no. Cradle cap is in patches against the head. Nits don’t roll that way.

So that leaves sebaceous oil deposits (for lack of better word…..I know that there must be an “official” one out there but so far I’m stumped). We especially find these on adolescents, even more so if they have been sweating.  I’ve had to plead with clients to please please believe me that this is not an egg. It can hang onto the strand stubbornly like it is an egg. It can be close to the right color when  are smaller. Sounds confusing? Yup.

Think of them as tiny balls of oil that have rolled up and solidified. A lice egg grows in conjunction with their brother and sister eggs from the same batch. The odds of eggs near each other being from the same source are very good, all about the same size and color. The sebaceous deposits are generally a light white which is (usually) the wrong color for a nit. They may vary in sizes and, most importantly, do not normally attach to just one side of the hair shaft. And they don’t have that whole wart feel thing going on. They slide down the shaft easily.  Think fatty. Again, ew.

One of the worst parts of having head lice in your home is the amount of uncertainty that is attached to it. If you still aren’t sure, get yourself a good lice comb, pretend what you think you may be seeing is really nits and start combing out whatever else may be on the head (see our instructional www.liceaunties.com/resources-instructions-for-removing-head-lice-and-nits.php). Can’t hurt. Could help.

For more information on our services please check us out at www.liceaunties.com.

Why?

People always ask us how we got into this business. Darned good question. And really not the same for any individual although we all seem to have of touch of OCD for lack of better ways of expressing it. We worry that we will miss something. We literally pick nits.

The women in our company are kind. We want to make people feel better. We also have a great sense of pride in our work. Human error happens and it takes a long time not to become devastated if something goes wrong. It makes us perfectionists.  It also make us good at assessing situations  and excellent communicators. We have to be crystal clear about what we can do, what we guarantee and how the client needs to be responsible in the situation to create a safe place for themselves against a recurrence. In other words, we cover our behinds as much as humanly possible from being an error because failing to stop the lice feels too bad. We charge them money.  Failure is unacceptable.  But we are human and humans aren’t perfect…..See? It is OCD stew.

You get used to it. It is part of life. Just like we get used to being “on call.” Instead of waiting around the treatment center all day, we come in for scheduled appointments. Which means that one day can be very very quiet and then next day we are working on a family of three with another one lined up right behind them. Most people feel better with a certain level of certainty regarding what they are going to do today and how much money they are making. We get paid if we work and we don’t if we don’t. We are counting on head lice for our financial well being.  On the other hand, we can also come and go as we please, put in our availability to suit our personal needs and, in general, have a lot more freedom than other types of jobs allow.

The treatment center also has a special clubhouse feeling that comes from inviting a concentration of people all in a situation that nobody wants to be in into the same space. Notes are compared. Social stigmas are weakened. House cleaning techniques examined. Wives tales dissected against the backdrop of professional reality. No one minds being found out that they have head lice in their family here…maybe only here…because it is a normal day at Lice Aunties Newton. And what happens in Lice Aunties, stays in Lice Aunties.

Earlier on, we did mostly a house call service but since the treatment center came along, we have the luxury of not flying solo as often. It’s wonderful. We have a second set of eyes if we are doubting our own judgment as a result of getting tired. We have a second set of hands to switch LouseBuster ™ device treatments with comb outs so that we don’t burn out. There is  intense concentration involved and it can be exhausting. I have a lice comb callous on my thumb. Company is so nice!

It is clean and tidy and routine there. There is little variety in treatment. Some hair types need to be dealt with more time and physical effort….we had an arm wilting 5 hour comb out on one head a couple of weeks ago….but mostly it is an hour and a half, maybe two and then they are gone. We wave to them as they leave, “We hope we never see you again!” and we all laugh. And we all mean it. It is a good feeling. We fixed their bad thing.

Then we do paper work. Clean up. Wash combs. Do laundry. Go home. Wait for the phone to ring or not the next day, not worrying about what happened the day before because we know that lice lost again.

For more information on our services please go to www.liceaunties.com

Head Lice Cometh

See this cute little baby that looks like she just had her thumb up a light socket? That’s me. And see the blond bombshell holding me? That’s my Ma. Or as she will later be known as, “The Lady Who Had To Comb Head Lice From The Head Of Four Little Girls With Super Thick Hair Down To Their Arses.” Poor Ma.

Our head lice was different from modern head lice. Ours was early 1970’s head lice that died when you dumped pesticides on children’s heads. I can remember being bent over my grandmother’s sink being shampooed and combed out, swearing that this was all my little sister’s fault. I didn’t bring it home. They found it on her head. I was an innocent bystander. Woe is me. Etc. Etc.

I don’t remember getting lice again. I don’t remember it being like I hear it is now, when our clients try again and again to get rid of them, lured into a false sense of security because they treated them at home with the shampoos and then two weeks later…SHAZAM!…..more head lice. Ma combed us out and that was the end of it.

We are very busy women, The Lice Aunties. Some days more than others, in surges of busy. But when we get hit, its bad. It’s a tidal wave of vermin. Because it is very very rare to find one case of head lice in one classroom. Usually its 1 client with lice, then maybe their siblings and then a whole bunch of others from the same classroom because there was really 2 or 3 cases whom thought that they could treat it with pesticide shampoo and the others would never catch on that…THEY HAD LICE.   Only those pesky head lice have developed a resistance to the pesticides, the combs in the kits were substandard so the parent didn’t comb out the nits (and maybe some bugs) from the head thoroughly and the kids are back out there, incubating a whole new generation to crawl onto their neighbors.

The good news is that we give head lice way more power than they actually have. None of the Lice Aunties have contracted head lice since we have been working there. Oh sure, we have been worried, but the longer you treat people, the more you know how head lice operate. We know our enemy. We have seen clients learn to properly assess their own situation when their children have been exposed and treat them before an infestation ensues.  And if they do come in with a dose of cooties, we send them home clean with instructions on how to deal with the residual effects of infestation in their homes and teach them precautionary tactics.

Yes it is not in the imaginations of those inflicted. There does seem to be more than when we were kids. Old methods don’t work as well but head lice still don’t possess super powers. And they aren’t bed bugs…

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