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.
The Lice Aunties 