Avoiding Head Lice
When your child catches head lice, our friendly staff at Lice Lifters of Florida want you to know that there are effective treatments available for this problem. That being said, one concern you may have, as a parent, is ensuring your family doesn’t have a recurrence of head lice right after treatment.
While it’s true that head lice typically spread through direct head-to-head contact, it’s also possible to pick them up off of items that were recently used by an infested person. This can include items worn on the head such as hats, helmets or scarves as well as personal grooming paraphernalia such as combs, brushes and barrettes.
Lice can’t live for long away from the moist, warm environment near our scalp. However, if other family members lay against the same sofa or pillow that an infested child used just moments before, a louse that fell off them can crawl onto this new person. If it’s a female louse, then an infestation on this person will soon follow after it lays eggs.
Catching Head Lice in Your Car
Lice can survive for only a couple of days without a human host. This may not sound like a long time, but it can be enough time to find a new host and start breeding. Just as they can fall off an infested person in the house when they’re sitting on the couch or laying on a pillow, they can also fall off while they’re in the car.
Delousing Your Car
The first thing you should do is remove any loose items that can be washed and do exactly that with them. Keep in mind, lice can live for a while underwater, so it’s not the washing itself that kills them but the heat in the dryer. For this reason, use the maximum heat setting on your dryer for these items.
For loose items that might be ruined by the dryer, seal them in a plastic bag. You can either put this bagged item in the freezer for 12 hours or leave it in the bag at room temperature for five days.
Once loose items are removed and dealt with, you want to vacuum any parts of your car where the infested child sits. Nearly all vacuums include a hand-held attachment, and this should prove useful in getting into any seems or indents in the headrest material to vacuum the area where the child recently treated for head lice sits.
Covering All Your Bases
Again, lice are typically spread when the hair of an infested person comes into contact with that of another. That said, washing items used by the afflicted person and vacuuming areas of your home and car where they spend a lot of time helps to provide a little insurance against the recurrence of this problem.
Head Lice Treatment That Works!
We’ve been talking about preventing reinfestation so far, but this neglects the fact that the person with the lice has to be effectively treated to rid them of the problem in the first place. There are a lot of head lice treatments out there that don’t work, but there’s one that we guarantee does work.
At Lice Lifters of Florida, our Coral Springs location makes us convenient for families in and around Broward County. When you bring in any kids you think may have head lice, the first thing we’ll do is double check if this is, in fact, the case. If we find them, we get to work eradicating the lice and their nits in a fast and affordable way that’s also 100 percent safe, natural and non-toxic. Don’t let your kids suffer from the itching and irritation of head lice. If your family has an outbreak, bring them to us to handle it, and then follow some common sense precautions cleaning out your home and car afterward to keep them from coming back.
