First time with lice-help-to bag or not?

[KT'smama]

Sorry this is so long. We are dealing with lice for the first time. Our 3.5 year old is the only one in the family to have it so far. We co sleep so I don't know how that's possible.

Day 1 was Saturday morning, I saw a bug crawl along her forehead at the hairline. I about died. I looked in her hair and saw another one and some things I assumed were nits. Called my mom over to help and she brings Nix and tells me it's the only way to get rid of them and tells me horror stories about other people and their lice problems. I freak out and let her use that stuff on my little one. Then I go into a frenzy, cleaning everything, bagging up stuffed animals, dress up clothes, boiling hairbrushes and hair bands, vacuming mattresses and floors, stripping beds, doing tons of laundry...I'm exhausted. While I'm doing this my mom picks about 10 bugs out of her hair.

Day 2 Yesterday we get up and I look in her hair and see a moving bug. I'm horrified because the stuff was supposed to KILL them and the nits for at least a week! I start going through her hair practically strand by strand and pull of more nits and about 10 bugs...mostly little ones. I've since read that nymphs aren't killed by the chemicals because their central nervous system isn't developed and that's how the chemicals kill the bugs by attacking that...so of course it didn't kill them. Then last night I go through and I find 2 little ones and a few nits.

Day 3 This morning I go through her hair again and find no bugs...and didn't see nits. Tonight I go through it again and find 1 tiny bug and 5 nits.
I think the nits must have just been ones I missed because I did not find an adult in her hair and the one I did find was not big enough to lay them I don't think.

So I've been reading online and have heard so many things to do or not to do. Some say bag, some don't. This is creating drama here because dd's favorite "lovey" is a bear that has a music button in it so it can't go in the wash. She sleeps with it tucked up around her head. It's in a bag and I've been dealing with tears and guilt for 3 days now.
If it's true that bagging isn't necessary then I really want to give her her lovey. The poor thing is traumatized and so am I!

We're all checking our heads and we have TTO in all of our shampoo now.
My oldest and I use a hair dryer on our heads every day and I flat iron mine and use hair products every day so maybe that helps with us not getting them.

I also have a 30 year old dryer that only has one heat setting that works. LOW...so I can't even throw things in the dryer on hot like I've read.

I've read that freezing things overnight in the freezer kill eggs and lice...anyone know if that works?

Any advice at all would be very appreciated.

[lula]

Ugh, I am right there with you. Just discovered lice on my kids. How did you get all of the nits out? I seriously am going crazy because the nits just seem stuck and I can't get them out. I have used a tweezers but at least half of the time I pull out the whole strand of hair.

[KT'smama]

It's awful isn't it? You just have to pull them out with your fingernails.
I just put the nails on either side and pull them up the hair shaft.
There are things you can do to loosen them up a bit...like using vinegar, or conditioner or something...but I just pull them out.
Hopefully we'll get some good advice!

Oh..and one thing I have done is keep a lint roller beside me so when I pick something out of her hair I stick it on the lint roller and I don't have to worry about it going anywhere. Then I take that out to the garbage can outside when we're done.

[damona]

kt'smama, the lint roller idea is brilliant. i wish i'd thought of that at the beginning of summer when we all went through this.

yes, it is necessary to bag stuff. i would also suggest taking your sheets and pillows, towels and clothes, to a laundromat to wash and dry on hot. i didn't take bagging things seriously enough and started unbagging after 2 weeks. couple days later, guess who had crawly things in her hair? yup, that would be me.

it was easy enough with the boys, relatively speaking. we shaved their heads, coated them in mayonnaise and covered with shower caps for most of a day. then i washed and combed, washed and combed with a metal nit comb until there just wasn't any critters left.

doing that for 4 kids was a picnic compared to spending 10 hours (not even kidding) combing out my nearly waist length hair by myself. i have never wished so fervently to be able to see the back of my own head. i alternated combing and soaking my hair in a strong tea tree solution, then combing again. 3 days of this before i stopped finding the little buggers.

i bleached and hot-watered all the sheets, towels, pillows, clothes, toys, everything i could get my hands on that would fit into my washer. if i could have shoved the couch in there i would have!

i wish you the best of luck. lice is such an unpleasant thing to have to deal with.

[orangefoot]

It is not necessary to bag everything and wash like a mad thing.

Lice cannot live off the human head for any significant amount of time and the lice that do fall off the head will be the less viable lice anyway. Who would willingly fall off the head that feeds?

Lice don't lay eggs on clothing or bedding either. The egg has to be close to the scalp in order to hatch which is why you rarely find them at the very end of a hair. The nape of the neck is a favourite hiding place and then once hatched you are more likely to find them on the top of the head or above the ears.

When you are combing for prevention, comb in the afternoon after school (if your dc go to school) or after an afternoon get together with other folks. Lice lay their eggs in the night so if you can get a ready-to-lay lice off your kid's head before nightfall you will save yourself a job of picking eggs off their hair next day.

[neptunemama]

You can bag or put in the dryer (washing isn't critical, the heat from the dryer will kill lice/nits). However the dryer can ruin some stuffed animals, altering the soft feel of their fur. Bagging takes longer but the animal stays intact.

Try olive oil on the hair for 1/2 -1 hr before combing out. It slows down the live bugs, the nits were fairly easy to find, and the hair is pretty easy to comb out too. I smothered my dd's hair with olive oil, then sat her in front of the tv to keep her occupied while I sectioned her hair into tiny sections, combed each one out very carefully, then braided each tiny section. The first time took 1-1/2 hrs at least. But the next couple of days didn't take as long. Also, I left her hair in the braids, and would remove two sections at once, comb through one (but having the adjoining one free made it so I didn't rip her hair), rebraid and move on to the next one.

[lula]

I decided to go the bagging like a mad fiend route because it makes my daughter/I sleep better. However we do have a favorite stuffed animal that I just put in the dryer for an hour on high. I really hope this works but I am planning on doing more research before giving it back to my son. (It's his favorite animal and he sleeps with it so not having it is hard but I don't want it to carry lice. ugh ugh ugh)

My daughter has allergies that make most lice medication impossible. The doctor recommended the Cetaphil method so that is what I am using on her. Honestly, if it works it is so much easier than the constant combing I am doing with my son that I am just switching everybody to the Cetaphil method. (my husband and I don't have signs of lice but we cosleep so I am going on the assumption that we have them, yes, this freaks me out for some reason.)

Have you done anything with your car?

[luv-my-boys]

we have been fortunate to have (so far) escape lice even though DS' preschool had a horrible breakout of resistant lice I actually called my ped. to ask him as I had no info/knowledge of lice at all and frankly had no idea what or how to go about making sure the kids were lice free. He actually had a great handout that had lots of natural remedies (other than the tradional nix) type things and one of the things was for this product along with TTO in shampoo. the trick is to get all the nits out which is VERY time consuming so using a good fine tooth comb is supposed to work wonders.

http://www.liceguard.com

[KT'smama]

Just thought I'd post some of what I've been reading today....


http://www.nitmix.com/headlice-myths-day5.htm

I've seen lots of stuff saying how much you have to clean, today I've found several that says you don't. Most of them are on the websites of different universities.

I've read some pretty contradictory stuff. Like this website below that clearly says how difficult it is for lice to live off of a host...but then goes on in further pages to tell you to bag and sweep and all the crazy stuff....
I'm leaning toward what orangefoot said. It just makes sense if you look at the life cycle of the lice and how they survive.
Don't know if I'm willing to pull all the stuffies out of their bags yet though!
LOL! Maybe just the one she wants most.

Also, from different websites and message boards, I see a big difference in how we in the states react to lice and how we treat than other countries.

This quote was taken from this website..http://www.michigan.gov/documents/Fi...l_103750_7.pdf page 12

Active stages cannot survive for more
than a few days away from the host. A nymph or adult louse that falls from the host will
perish within a few days under the most optimal conditions (low temperature and high
humidity). Under normal conditions, the survival time is most likely measured in hours.
This is because the louse is very susceptible to dehydration and will rapidly starve if removed
from a blood source. Eggs can survive longer off-host periods (a week or more), but the
hatched nymph must come in contact with human head hair almost immediately or it will
perish. Louse eggs also do not hatch at normal room temperatures; they require the higher
temperatures associated with mammalian bodies. Lice are very host-specific, and will not
survive/proliferate on pets – you cannot get lice from your dog or cat. All of this suggests
12
that efforts to control head lice should be concentrated on removing/killing lice on the
host.
13

[lia_joy]

My family also just got lice. We were in a wilderness immersion program when we discovered them, so natural treatements were the only option. my 2 older boys we just shaved thier heads- my hair is thick and past my waist and I'm very attatched to it. my nearly 2yo still has his beautiful baby curls so we didn't want to part with those either. We greased our heads (completely covered with a THICK layer) with a mixture of bearfat and teatree oil (after returning home, we used olive oil and butter in place of the beargrease) and kept them wrapped for a few hours with plastic to suffocate the bugs, then just with fabric to keep the grease in place and the bugs from spreading for a few days. It actually ended up loosening the eggs, too and we went through carefully multiple times picking eggs out one by one, but there were no bugs after a couple days with the grease treatement. We are still keeping our eyes out, but the problem seems to be taken care of and instead of stripping our hair with nasty chemicals, we are nicely conditioned If your daughter will wear a shower cap or bandana for any length of time, I highly recomend greasing her head and putting something over it. then even if a live bug happens to be on her bear it will not go back to her head and lay eggs. it will also keep them from spreading to the rest of the family.

[IdentityCrisisMama]

I have friends who do the petroleum/EOO and they are the ones having reoccurrences (or keep getting lice) so I didn't go that route.

We have a method that I think is pretty good.

The downside is it involves a parent to get pretty down and dirty with the lice and it takes a while. The positives are that it's safe and keeps you on top of the lice.

We use a quality lice comb. http://www.headlice.org/licemeister/index.htm

I would comb wet conditioned hair every day until you get no lice. Then I would go through dry hair and try to get as many nits as you can. Then I could comb wet conditioned hair every 4 days for a while and then down to every week until you see nothing left. Basically, you are combing out the hatched nits before they have a chance to lay new eggs. The comb is amazingly effective at picking up even the smallest louse (so long as they are in a semi-protective sate of being wet).

I realize this may not be good enough for a full fledged school outbreak but it has the added benefit of being a GREAT tool for those times that you worry about exposure and would like a quick preventative.

Another thing I read about but didn't try is the Cetaphil technique:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...phil-for-lice/

We did not bag anything or even go on much of a washing spree. What I read about their lifespan made me think it was a wasted effort. I remember reading that they can survive water for quite some time but don't do so well in heat so the dryer would be your friend if you want to wash like crazy.

[IdentityCrisisMama]

Re: the stuffed animal

I would just wash that one. I've washed most of DC's stuffies and they all seem fine. The dryer should kill anything on there.

[savithny]

First, it is NOTHING to freak about. They don't carry diseases, they don't mean you're dirty or ill-bred or anything like that! They're just bugs!!

Second, at this point MOST lice are resistant to the OTC shampoos. The prescription-only ones scare the bejeesus out of me.

You can get rid of them. It's really, really time consuming, but you can get rid of them without resorting to industrial grade pesticides. You dont' need to bag everythign for weeks or have the entire house bagged and sprayed -- an australian group did a study where they followed schoolchildren for years. They found 2000 kids with lice, removed something like 25,000 lice and eggs from them ... and even though they used a CSI-style vacuum on the classrooms every night, they never found any lice or eggs on the floor. They just don't willingly leave heads.

We washed everyone's bedding (because she crawls in with us and shares stuff with brother) and bagged the stuffed animals from her bed. Lice off a head die in 36-48 hours (or less). You can also do 20 minutes in the dryer.

We did the Cetaphil treatment. It worked wonderfully. I just posted about it on another thread, and you can find the basic protocol if you google Cetaphil Lice treatment. In reading around, I found that some things really seem to improve success:

1) do it just like they say - get a squeeze bottle, use a LOT, get it all over every hair.
2) They say you don't really need to nit comb. But -- You *should* nit comb. Get a good metal one and go over every section of scalp, putting the comb against the head, pulling through and up, and then doing it in the other direction.
3) The main key to the cetaphil thing seems to be using the blow dryer to get it completely dry. They say it "shrink wraps" the hair and lice, but I suspect the fact that it took 45 minutes blow drying on HOT to get DD's hair dry also has something to do with it (see the 'lice die in the dryer" point above). Air drying won't accomplish the heat-killing, and heat *can* kill eggs (or render them unhatchable).
4) Repeat at the intervals they tell you to -- Most treatments dont' kill eggs. Lice hatch and spend several days feeding and growing before they mate an dlay new eggs. So you need to repeat the combing and treatment every few days (5, in this case) to kill newly hatched bugs before they can breed.

It's messy (you get Cetaphil everywhere) and time consuming (the first go-round with DD, who has shoulder-length curly hair, took me over 2 hours on her, including blow drying). But it was so much easier on skin and my conscience than the idea of Lindane or Malathion (we tried Nix and it didn't work - ours were resistant)

[KT'smama]

Well today was day 4. I put conditioner and TTO on her dry hair and let it sit awhile then combed through it with a lice come and got a couple nits out, no lice. Rinsed it good and let pulled it up in a ponytail. She has curly hair and with all the extra conditioner it looked beautiful with all those shiny curls.
Tonight I sectioned off her hair ran the lice comb through each section, then went back through it with a comb separating it in lines in each section and I only found 1 nit and no lice. It took me 3 hours tonight, but it's worth it.


I have read about the Cetaphil method, but it involves a hair dryer and she hates them. She has some issues with things that are loud so that wouldn't work, as much as I'd like to try it.

I'm going to use the sweeper hose on her lovey bear and let her have it. It's been in a bag for 4 days. If there are nits on it, they will get sucked up in the sweeper. From what I've read they won't hatch anyway away from the warmth of the head, and if they do will die pretty much right away without a blood meal. The reason I didn't want to stick that one in the wash was because it has a music button in it...it plays a song. She loves it. I ruined one like it that was my older dd's when she was little and had puked on it...but what can you do then right? LOL


Okay, so tonight I found no live ones. Yesterday I only found the one tiny, tiny one.
I'm excited that there might be light at the end of the tunnel.
I wish I'd just done this from the start and not go crazy. I've always had a fear of my girls getting lice because of their long hair and the stories of people having to cut their girls hair because of it.

I don't think people who get lice are dirty or are ill bred or anything! I just don't like the idea of these little bugs crawling around on our heads and sucking our blood...it just eeks me out.

[IdentityCrisisMama]

Good work mama! I read Savathy's description of the Cetaphil method and it sounds WAY more complicated than just combing the hair - I would reserve that for a full scale infection.

I would continue every 4 days combing until you see no lice (even small ones) and then move to once/week for a while. Personally, I'm going to do a monthly throughout the school year and will comb each time someone in the school has lice. And, that's not even me being all anal - combing with that lice meister is that easy.

[orangefoot]

Originally Posted by KT'smama

Also, from different websites and message boards, I see a big difference in how we in the states react to lice and how we treat than other countries.

Here in the UK everyone combs and combs and combs but no-one bags, washes or steams or bleaches! My kids have all had the varmints visit their 5 star hotel heads at one time or another and we have got rid of them just by combing.

I was shocked the first time I read about lice here on mothering years ago and read all the palaver that you mamas are told you have to do to rid yourselves of the miserable things. Kind of like the madness you have to put up with over breastfeeding when out and about or fighting to get a homebirth:

[lula]

I am glad that it is going well for you!

We are doing the Cetaphil method (though my son is adverse to hair dryers so it is a little tricky but movies have been helpful) Frankly other than the long dry times it is really simple. The directions may sound complicated but I find it much easier than constant combing. We are also combing but my 2 year old with waist length hair isn't the best at dealing with combing.

[IdentityCrisisMama]

Originally Posted by orangefoot

I was shocked the first time I read about lice here on mothering years ago and read all the palaver that you mamas are told you have to do to rid yourselves of the miserable things.

Palaver - a word I wish we used here in 'merica...it's fitting that we don't because we do seem to love to make a big deal out of things. I agree!

[savithny]

Originally Posted by lula

I am glad that it is going well for you!

We are doing the Cetaphil method (though my son is adverse to hair dryers so it is a little tricky but movies have been helpful) Frankly other than the long dry times it is really simple. The directions may sound complicated but I find it much easier than constant combing. We are also combing but my 2 year old with waist length hair isn't the best at dealing with combing.

Yep, it's really not hard, but the drying takes for-ever. We also did movies, though we had to turn on subtitles because of the sound of the dryer. I think of it as incentive to get DD reading faster!

DH's aunt told him about a new method she'd heard about that basically involves sitting under one of those old-school salon hood dryers. I wonder if they still sell the dryers for old fashioned home wave sets -- the ones with a plastic shower cap style thing that inflated when you turned them on?

[KT'smama]

Today we gave dd back her favorite bear and her other favorite animals from her bed. I asked her if she wanted Lovey Bear back and she said "yes!, I miss you Lovey Bear, we miss you" and it was so sweet. She sat on the couch just loving him for a long time.

Day 5. I couldn't bring myself not to check tonight. So I did...and nothing.
I am so happy about that.

I looked up the lice meister comb and did the area code search. No one sells it near here. I'll have to order it on line. I definitely won't be doing anything but combing in the future if we're visited by these very unwelcome little buggers. A couple nights ago I got a better metal comb to use for now. It looks just like the LM comb but not as wide and with a red rubber handle.

Thanks for all the input ladies!