Ask the Expert Archive Week 12
Head lice
It doesn't matter if your child is the cleanest kid in the class, if headlice break out at school, they're headed for your home. Here's Dr. Neil Shear on how to de-louse your family.
One of the most frustrating and scary problems that can affect a family is head lice. When there is head lice in the family there is usually chaos reigning. How can you treat it? Do you keep your child out of school? Where do you go for information? First you have to know what is happening. There is a small tiny bug that is crawling around the scalp and it is laying eggs. These eggs are usually a centimetre from the scalp so you have to get down into the hair and look very carefully at the scalp. These eggs are called nits and they are stuck on to the hairs, they look like little pieces of dandruff but they don't come off as easily as dandruff. In fact as you go through the treatment you are going to remove these with nit combs because you are going to want to get rid of anything to do with the lice.
So what do you do? Well the first thing that you try is chemical treatments and then second thing is isolate the child from any source of reinfection. The chemical treatments are premethrin creams and they go on as rinses. They are put on the skin after a light wash and they are left on for at least ten minutes. Sometimes you can leave them on longer, even overnight, there does not seem to be a problem.
That process is repeated one week later. In that intervening week, that's the chance to go through and remove all of these lice and all of these nits, sometimes you need a magnifying glass to make sure that you see it all. You also have to get all the clothing, anything that was on the bed, and any favourite pillows or dolls and isolate them in a bag for a week or two. If they can be washed, wash them in very hot water for about half an hour. This is the way that you can eradicate them. There is always the possibility of reinfection, someone at the school can spread it back to your child, there is also the possibility, and we are seeing this, that the lice are becoming resistant to these medications. If this is the case then you will probably need to seek professional advice as to alternatives and need to go over that with your physician. If you would like to send a question to Ask the Expert you can either email us at rx@tvo.org or fill out our form.
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