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All parents should regularly check their child’s hair for hair lice and their often first-spotted symptom, the charmingly-named ‘nits’ (meaning eggs).

As a professional daycare centre covering Ashfield, we’re obliged to periodically issue reminders on this. As it has been a little while since we last did so, a quick overview of the problem and solutions is given below.

Daycare centres – on the lookout for unwanted hair occupants!

Hair lice have always done their best to set up home in the hair of human beings, at least as far as we know.

For thousands of years, checking for them and then trying to eradicate them was considered to be as normal as we today think about teeth cleaning. In some societies, even that wasn’t necessarily undertaken, with hair lice just being seen as an ordinary and inescapable part of life.

Hair lice though are always unpleasant and they may be a serious nuisance, causing irritation and of course, they’re unsightly. They do not, in themselves, carry disease but the irritation they cause can, usually as a secondary effect of intense scratching, lead to scalp infections.

They’re not a germ or virus so they can’t ‘infect’ a child but they can spread from one person’s hair to another. That process is technically ‘infestation’.

That’s why an Ashfield Daycare Centre will always be on the lookout for these tiny but seriously annoying creatures in children’s hair.

Symptoms

Adult hair lice are very small (2-3mm long when fully grown) but are often quite readily visible to the naked eye, as they move in the hair.

Although we’ve called them ‘hair lice’ so far, as it is the common term, technically they’re called “head lice” and the condition of infestation with them is called “pediculosis capitis”. They are a separate species to body lice (which do carry illnesses) and pubic lice. The species cannot interbreed and each is adapted to its own area of body infection. They cannot live on any other animal including apes (which have their own species).

There are three visible symptoms of hair lice infestation:

• regular intense scratching of the head. The scalp may be red from irritation or have slight lesions, usually caused by scratching;
• lice moving around on the head;
• tiny white specs attached to hairs. These are the eggs of lice, called ‘nits’

How infestation arises

Hair lice cannot jump or fly. They can usually only move from one person to another by crawling, meaning physical contact between heads/hair. This is more common in children than adults, hence hair lice in the Western world are most commonly found in those under 5-6.

It’s estimated that about 95% of infestations happen through head-to-head contact but most experts accept there is a theoretical risk of infestation through shared headwear. However, hair lice cannot live for long (perhaps an absolute maximum of 24-48 hours) once they’re off a human head, as it removes their food supply (blood).

Myths about Nits

It’s important to restate regularly:

• hair lice infestation is absolutely nothing to do with hygiene. Studies have shown that they prefer cleaner hair to that which is dirtier;
• as mentioned above, they cannot fly or jump between people;
• they do not prefer one type of hair or hair colour, to another;
• they also have no preferences for longer or shorter hair, however, if a child has longer hair, then that may increase the total amount of surface hair a hair louse may be able to have ‘pass their way’ and be able to grab onto. For that reason, some experts recommend children with very long hair may wish to have their hair braided, plaited or rolled up in a bun when playing with other children.

Treatment

Extra hair washing alone will not solve the problem. That’s because a two-stage approach is required:

• to kill and remove the mature hair lice – that’s usually undertaken with some form of medicated shampoo. A pharmacist or possibly doctor will usually recommend one and some homeopathic shampoos may be effective too but do take advice;
• to remove the nits which might otherwise hatch out in due course and re-infest the head. This is usually done by a special very fine comb called, unimaginatively, a ‘nit comb’.

Be prepared to need to repeat this process several times over some weeks, as the pharmacist advises.

As part of our normal professional daycare centre practices, we’ll keep a close eye out for such signs in any child and if spotted, draw that immediately to the parents’ attention.