Head Lice Resources

headlice October 30th, 2007

Licenders' years of treating headlice at home for thousands of clients, puts us in the unique position to offer expert head lice help. When you are dealing with lice, help from our professional experience can keep you from getting overwhelmed.

Previously, we have given guidelines for head lice removal in the main rooms of your house during a "lice epidemic". Now we will guide you in removing head lice from the bedrooms, bathrooms and any personal areas of your home. Rooms that are used for sleeping, dressing, or washing by the adults or children who have head lice in your home, need more care than the other rooms. Once you have taken just a few more steps, you will confidently remove all the lice in those rooms too.

We will start with the bedroom. The first thing to recognize is that human head lice are not bed bugs. Lice are completely different than bedbugs in the way they feed, the way they behave, and their life cycles:

Bedbugs can live for several months without feeding. A louse, on the other hand, will die, usually within 24 hours off of a human head! Lice need to be on a human head in order to thrive. They suck blood a few times in any given day.

Another major difference is that bed bugs hide in mattresses, carpets, behind peeling paint or wallpaper, and in crevices in wooden furniture. Bed bugs lay their eggs in cracks and crevices.

Headlice do not embed themselves into mattresses, quilts, pillows or any other such items. You do not have to worry about removing lice from furniture. Lice cannot lay nits (lice eggs) anyplace off of a human head either. Your furniture cannot be infested with lice!

The lice problem in the bedroom is, that sometimes a louse can crawl off of the infected person, and survive on the pillow or linen for a short amount of time. During that time, it is possible for the louse to crawl back onto the head of a person who was already treated, shampooed, and had the lice removed by combing. This would lead to a lice re-infestation in the child, because if they crawl back on to the head, the lice can feed (suck blood) again, and continue to thrive. If there is a surviving louse on the linens of an infested child, it will find a human head again the next time that child lays down on his bed - if that happens within a few hours, before it dies!

Another consideration is that a sibling who did not previously have any lice and nits, may lie down on his sister’s bed. If there is even one louse on the linen of that bed, it can crawl onto the sibling's head, and it could be missed, because that child was already found to be lice free! In this way the child who did not originally have lice at all, can re-infect his family.

In order for maintain the efforts you put into removing head lice from your kid's head, linens from the infected child must be treated properly to remove any possibility of lice re-infestation. It is not difficult to properly treat bedroom linens if your child has lice. We will explain how to do this correctly.

To be continued.

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