All About Head Lice

Lice are little beasties about the size of a matchstick head. There are many different types of lice which like humans. There are head lice, body lice and pubic lice (also called ‘crabs’ because of their shape but rather smaller and don’t live on the beach!)

Head Lice

The life of a head louse is a mere three weeks. They like everybody's hair but some more than others. They prefer short hair to long, clean hair to dirty (no, that's not a mistake). They seem to spread only directly by head to head contact, they cannot jump, hop, fly or swim, and they can spend time on several heads a day.

What the head louse does when it gets on to your head - between the hairs - is to take a good bite at your skin (up to 200 bites a day per louse). When it bites, its spit irritates your skin and makes you want to scratch. Having bitten and sucked out a little bit of your blood, it then shits. When you scratch, you rub their shit into the bites and the irritation gets worse. The next thing they do (at seven days of age) is start having sex and laying eggs, which they attach to the roots of your hair. A short, but not such a lousy life after all.

Getting rid of head lice

To stop this qrossness you first have to find the beast, which is the hard part as they are nearly transparent and a bit smaller than the head of a match; and the eggs on the hair are pinhead-sized and flesh-coloured. There are two things to do – the first is to regularly comb your hair which breaks the legs off the lice. Life is not so easy for a legless louse and they fall off our heads and die. The second thing is to use an anti-louse lotion. The instructions are on the bottle. You can by it at your local pharmacy (cheaper to get mum to do it!) and the whole family need to use it at the same time because if one of you have it so does the rest of the family and it just gets passed around. Luckily - if used properly - it not only kills the lice but protects you for a bit against getting them again. You have to leave it on at least two hours and some of them over night and you can’t go swimming for two days after using it or blow-dry your hair (chlorine in water and heat stop it working).

Just because you have head lice doesn’t mean that you are, in anyway, dirty. Head lice aren’t fussy and seem to like clean hair just as much as dirty hair.