Word: lice
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Thousands of parents and school officials are calling county health offices to report that the standard arsenal of commercial lice-killing products seems to be having little effect. In Iowa, Virginia and Oklahoma, newspaper articles have discussed the merits of such home remedies as olive oil and vinegar. In Rhode Island, Idaho and Florida, parents are trading tips on smearing their kids' hair with vaseline, steam cleaning the carpets and storing teddy bears in the refrigerator. "It's creating a lot of havoc," says Wayne Kramer, the Nebraska state medical entomologist, who has received 125 calls since the beginning...
...human head louse has been around for millenniums. Archaeologists have found evidence of head lice in the hair of ancient Egyptian mummies. And each year, 10 million to 12 million Americans receive unsolicited calls from the sesame seed-size insects, which set up shop in human scalps and lay eggs, or nits, that they cement to hair shafts. Head lice do not carry disease, but they are tenacious and a rather nasty sight. In the past few decades, the problem had been controlled with shampoos or soaps, many of them containing permethrin, the most widely used of the lice-killing...
Researchers speculate that overexposure to permethrin may have sparked a process of natural selection in lice. A similar use of preventive insecticides encouraged the rise of resistant strains of the mosquitoes and black flies responsible for transmitting malaria and African river blindness. Although no definitive studies on resistant strains of head lice have been completed in the U.S. (results of a Harvard investigation won't be ready for several months), two recent papers from Israel and the Czech Republic seem to support the resistant-strain theory. Says Thomas Bell, health officer for three counties in Washington State...
Even though the theory remains to be proved, its implications dovetail with the experiences of parents like Michele Colburn, a working mother from Washington who recently spent six months battling lice on her 11-year-old daughter. "The lice would disappear from her head and then reappear," Colburn recalls. "I went to the public library at the National Institutes of Health and read up everything on lice. I borrowed a magnifying glass that is used in the museum for conservation work so that I could check her head for lice. I tried every shampoo on the market. I bagged...
...what do the experts recommend? The key is removal of the nits, which are much harder to spot than the full-grown lice and which only lead to more of the insects if they are not painstakingly picked or combed out during thorough examinations of a child's hair. Some kids may benefit from a number of over-the-counter products, but their efficacy varies from case to case. For nit and lice removal, several school systems are experimenting with a metal-toothed comb endorsed by the nonprofit National Pediculosis Association (www. headlice.org) Advice on insecticides and home remedies...