Yikes - lice!
In the nursery, we dealt with rotavirus and the ubiquitous runny nose. In preschool, it was mostly colds, with a little bit of hand, foot, and mouth disease thrown in to mix things up. Since my oldest daughter started kindergarten this year, we have a new contagion to worry about - lice!!
As it turns out, the public schools (in Florida, anyway) don’t seem terribly worried about it anymore. I remember when I was in elementary school, my public school had a “no nits” policy. Every so often, every student was checked, and those that had lice were sent home until it was gone. I remember lots of kids coming back to school with shorter hair a couple of days later.
Twice this year, my daughter brought notes home from school saying that at least one classmate has lice. However, when I asked her about it, she said that the girls who had it were back at school the next day. I didn’t think too much about it - I assumed that a one-time treatment did the trick.
Not so. She came home from school one Tuesday afternoon, and in the evening, as I was helping her out of the shower and drying her hair, I noticed little tiny crawling bugs in her hair - it could only be lice. When I exclaimed, “You have lice,” she responded by listing at least three of her friends from school who had it also. When I asked her if they have missed any school, she said no. I hadn’t received a note home in months. So what gives - does everyone go to school with lice, or is it that easy to get rid of?
Well, it definitely wasn’t that easy to treat. After she got her pajamas on, we barely made it through dinner (all of us feeling very itchy all of a sudden) before PB (my husband) went off to the drugstore for the medicated shampoo. It was a fairly simple process to shampoo her head, and then comb the lice out. But what about the eggs, which are called nits? She had a lot of them, and the first night I spent at least an hour combing through and picking them out. We washed all the bedding and her clothing, and put her pillows and stuffed animals in the garage in plastic garbage bags. But that wasn’t the end of it.
We spent four hours the next day picking out nits (I kept her home from school), probably two hours the following day, and the third day, I let her go back to school because I was scheduled to be there as well to volunteer. I went with misgivings because it was three days after my initial discovery and was still finding one or two live lice each time I combed through her hair. It was then that I found out that our school doesn’t do regular screenings for lice, and don’t send children home if they have lice.
After two treatments and twelve days of spending at least 30-45 minutes picking out nits, as well as spraying the furniture and carseats, washing bedding two or three times, washing clothes, etc., I feel pretty confident that she is lice/nit-free. It was pretty rough, though, because I got it too, and while PB has lots of great qualities, I’m not as confident in his ability to locate and remove nits from my long, thick hair. He combed through my hair three times and found nits only once, but three days later, I had live lice that I treated with the shampoo and removed. As of this writing, I’ve had two treatments and hopefully am nit-free, but I’m feeling a little itchy!
The information I referenced in my battle against lice came from the following web sites:
- National Pediculosis Association: http://www.headlice.org/
- Harvard School of Public Health: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/headlice.html
- Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/head-lice/DS00953
- American Academy of Pediatrics: http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/pediatrics;110/3/638.pdf
The most aggravating thing about my experience is how unconcerned everyone else seems to be about the whole thing. All of the above web sites talk about how lice is really not a big problem because lice do not transmit any disease, although lice does cause “a high level of anxiety among parents of school-age children.”¹ (I guess they are talking about me!) The American Academy of Pediatrics does NOT advocate a no-nit policy because nits alone do not necessarily guarantee an infestation and because in the past, no-nit policies have resulted in students missing too much school. While I understand that lice is not a serious public health threat, I feel very strongly that after I’ve gone through so much hassle and effort and expense (one package of shampoo, gel and spray is about $19), I do not want her immediately reinfested. So what to do?
Most of the suggestions I’ve gotten for avoiding lice is to put gel/hairspray in her hair because lice don’t like it. Another suggestion was to keep it braided. And she’s been sternly lectured about not laying on someone else’s towel at rest time, not sharing brushes, etc. But the minute she was back in class, I could see that those kinds of comments are totally futile - my kindergartener is just too friendly for her own good 
I did not use any of the “smothering” home remedies that I read about because the above sites didn’t really endorse any of them, although I know people who have tried the mayonnaise shampoo. Now that we’ve done the two treatments with the medicated (read: pesticide) shampoo, though, if we are reinfested in the near future, we may try one of the home remedies as an alternative. The shampoo recommendations say to see a doctor after two treatments if there are still live lice found. Some media reports say that lice are becoming more resistant to pesticides, but most of the authoritative web sites say that if you still have lice after two treatments, you’ve more likely been reinfested from another source.
References:
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Wow, that sucks. So, we should all just run around with bugs in our hair because they don’t spread diseases?! F-that. Kill the bastards. And yes, parents should keep their little infested children home. I don’t care if lice make the endangered species list - I’ll buy the shampoo over the Internet and eradicate the lot of them! Stupid tree-huggers.